The Baltic Sea offers some very treacherous waters even under the best of circumstances. The price to pay for sailing the Baltic through the millenniums has been high, and traces of those costs are scattered over the bottom.
In 1625, Sweden’s King Gustav II Adolf ordered four ships—large regal ships—to crown the fleet. The four ships were Vasa, Äpplet, Scepter and Svärdet.
The Baltictech diving team found the shipwreck, estimated to be around 175 years old, about 58 meters (190 feet) deep off the Swedish coast. Among the relics, divers discovered over 100 bottles of champagne, astonishingly well-preserved in the cold, dark waters of the Baltic.
While the ship was found around 20 nautical miles (37km) south of the Swedish island of Öland, however, it’s not clear where it was heading to. The team believes the ship was en route to Russia, where the aristocracy prized champagne.
Located in the Åland Archipelago of the Baltic Sea is the wreck of the late 19th-century, German-made, three-masted, iron-hulled barque named Plus, which was lost on a stormy night in 1933. Andrea Murdock Alpini describes his journey there and his dives on this wreck.
In a pivotal legal decision, the Court of Appeal in Sweden has revised the sentences of four men convicted in 2022 for offences against Sweden's heritage laws. These individuals were found guilty of plundering several wrecks off the coast of Öland, challenging the preservation of national heritage.
From 2013 to 2020, the convicted men retrieved a multitude of artefacts from shipwrecks near Öland, using some to adorn their homes. Dive logbook entries suggest that their activities may have begun as early as 1987.
Sweden's military has now analyzed the video footage provided by Swedish wreckhunter group Ocean X Team and concluded that it is the wreck of a Russian submarine that sank after a collision with a Swedish vessel in 1916 during the First World War. Ocean X was the team who also found the "Baltic anomali"
The armoured cruiser Carl Friedrich was constructed in the year 1902 at the well-known shipyard of Blohm & Voss in Hamburg, Germany. The armoured cruiser had a length of 126m and was equipped with an impressive array of guns and torpedo launchers. She was the second ship of the Prinz Adalbert class when she was commissioned by the Imperial German Navy on 12 December 1903.
The discoveries in the Baltic Sea are unprecedented and have revealed shipwrecks hundreds of years old. Two of them are with great certainty cargo vessels from the Netherlands, while the third and largest is supposed to be a Scandinavian vessel.
All three shipwrecks stand like ghost ships almost unscathed in total darkness on the seabed at a depth of approximately 150 meters and beyond the reach of modern fishing vessels.
In order to obtain the best footage, two Swedish photogrammetry experts Ingemar Lundgren and Fredrik Skorg from the company Ocean Discovery took part in the expedition. An underwater robot equipped with an advanced camera brought thousands of images to the surface and reproduces with great precision a virtual image of the wrecks as they actually appear.
The pictures are so detailed that you get the feeling of being able to walk around a ship that sank hundreds of years ago.
Launched in 1629, Applet (Apple) was built by the same shipbuilder as the famed 69-metre Vasa, which was carrying 64 cannons when it went down in a strait off the island of Vaxholm, just outside the capital, Stockholm. Vasa was meant to serve as a symbol of Sweden’s military might at the time but capsized after sailing just over 1,000 metres. It was salvaged in 1961 and is on display at the Vasa Museum in Stockholm, one of Sweden’s most popular tourist spots.
The shipwreck, which has been found to be about 375 years old, was found nearly 36 feet beneath the surface of the Trave River - a river in Schleswig-Holstein, Germany, which flows into the Baltic Sea at Travemünde. The ship was found during routine measurements of the river by the local waterway and shipping authority which detected an anomaly at the river bottom using a multibeam echosounder.
