15 shipwrecks around the world

The Mary Jarecki was a wooden bulk-freight steamship weighing 645 tons and 200 feet in length. It hit Au Sable Reef and went down July 4, 1883. The Jarecki shipwreck is on the shore of Lake Superior just north of the mouth of the Hurricane River.

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The sailing vessel Peter Iredale was a four-masted steel barque that ran ashore Oct. 25, 1906, along the Oregon coast en route to the Columbia River. It was abandoned on Clatsop Spit near Fort Stevens in Warrenton about 4 miles south of the Columbia River channel. The wreckage is still visible, making it a popular tourist attraction as one of the most accessible shipwrecks of the Graveyard of the Pacific.

MS Zenobia was a Swedish-built Challenger-class ferry launched in 1979 that capsized and sank in the Mediterranean Sea, close to Larnaca, Cyprus, in June 1980 on its maiden voyage. It now rests on its port side in approximately 138 feet of water and is known as one of the top 10 wreck diving sites in the world.

A fragment of the 2,100-year-old Antikythera Mechanism, believed to be the earliest surviving mechanical computing device. The bronze system of cogs and wheels was found by sponge divers in a Roman wreck off southern Greece in 1900.

Studies of the Antikythera wreck suggest it was a Roman ship that sank between 70 B.C. and 60 B.C., during a voyage to Italy from the Roman domains in Greece and Asia Minor. It’s likely the ship sank while sheltering from a storm in the cove, taking with it a literal fortune in fine art and other treasures that were possibly trade goods, gifts or plunder.

The Swedish 17th-century royal warship Vasa lies in dry dock in Stockholm. The Vasa was the pride of the Swedish Navy when it was launched in 1628. Built on the orders of Swedish King Gustavus Adolphus for his expansionist war in Poland and named for the Royal House of Vasa, it was magnificently equipped as one of the most powerful warships in the world. The Vasa set sail from Stockholm on Aug. 10, 1628, and barely traveled 1 mile before it foundered and sank, just 20 minutes into its first voyage and in view of the crowds onshore that had gathered to cheer its departure.

The wreck of the Vasa was rediscovered in the 1950s, and in 1961 the wreck was secured in a lifting frame that allowed it to be moved into shallower water and excavated in stages. Since 1990, the wreck of the Vasa has been on display in a museum in Stockholm, where the timbers of the ship are constantly washed by a rain of preservatives to slow their decay.

The Spiegel Grove was a U.S. Navy dock landing ship that was commissioned in 1956. It sank June 10, 2002, and found in 2005 just 6 miles off of Key Largo. The ship is the largest in the world ever scuttled to become an artificial reef.

The Mary Rose, one of the fastest and most heavily armed warships in the English fleet, sank in 1545 while leading the attack on a French invasion fleet at the mouth of Portsmouth Harbour, on England’s southern coast. Historians and archaeologists still debate the cause of the sinking.

The wreck of the Mary Rose was discovered in 1971 by a diving team investigating shipwrecks near Portsmouth. In 1982, the Mary Rose was brought to the surface for the first time in more than 400 years, in a purpose-built lifting frame attached to wires passing through the remains of the hull.

The Mary Rose Museum was reopened to the public in July 2016 after an extensive redesign that now allows visitors to enter the top deck of the wreck through an “air lock” into the climate-controlled gallery.