Society supports Unpath’d Waters to unite maritime archives
The Society is proud to be supporting Bangor University School of Ocean Sciences and Historic England in a 3-year ground-breaking online project, Unpath’d Waters, which aims to unite the UK’s maritime archives and data collections.
A lack of high-quality geophysical data and limited research means our maritime heritage remains poorly understood and thousands of shipwrecks around the UK coastline have been identified incorrectly or remain unknown.
Unpath’d Waters is now developing new methods to help solve this problem. These methods will accelerate maritime research activity and support the development of research tools designed to improve the management of UK wreck sites.
Focussing on vessels lost in the Irish Sea, the project will create effective processes for refining wreck site identification, and will also develop efficient methods for integrating marine scientific data with the historic record and maritime collections.
Maritime archives and data collections associated with vessel losses in UK territorial waters are currently held in lots of different places, but by improving the levels of connectivity between these disparate collections will allow methods to be developed that improve how we identify ships and other vessels. It will also make it easier to research the unique physical attributes and long-term integrity of ship wrecks.
The work of the Shipwrecked Mariners’ Society and the help it provided, relates to MV Tuskar, a Dutch Motor Vessel from which the Captain and crew had to abandon ship in April 1961, which you can read about here.
To find out more about the Science and the Sea project, go to: https://unpathdwaters.org.uk/science-and-the-sea/