Russian scientists create Baltic atlas of the sink ships

Baltic sea is a dead ships' graveyard, believes Andrey Lukoshkov, the chief scientist of the project "Mysteries of the Sunk Ships", which is being realised by a team of specialists from Saint Petersburg, Moscow, The Great Novgorod and Vyborg.

In past, being a mountain engineer, Lukoshkov did natural resources underwater research. In 1989 during an expedition a sunk ship was found. This unexpected finding excited the scientist's interest. He did more research, and works on catalogue and atlas of ships sunk in the Baltic sea.

To this moment there are over 10,000 objects in the database. The catalogue and atlas list the entire Baltic sea area, but are most detailed in description of its Eastern part, including the shoreline from Kaliningrad on South to Tornee (Komi) on the North of the Botnic Bay. In a Russian sector of the Bay of Finland more than 5,000 objects were located, from them 2,500 are ship; 1,500 are airplanes, the rest is boats, vehicles (automobiles, tanks, tractors, downs), various small equipment.

By national origin, 25% of the dead ships belong to the Russian fleet, 19% to the Germans, 17% to the English, 15% are of Swedish origin, 8% from Holland and 7% belong to Finland. The remaining 9% include Norway, Denmark, French, American, Italian, Estonian and Latvian ships. All of them sunk in this sea in the period from 1128 to 1947 year (information of ITAR-TASS).

The highest concentration of the sunken ships was observed in the Vyborg Bay, where in July of the 1790 a big military combat took place between the Russian and Swedish fleets. As Lukoshkov says, the Finland Bay is an ancient trade road, which passed large number of ships. Many of them did not arrive to their destinations, and still wait for researchers underwater.