(gentle music) (water rushing)
Diving, for me, is peace.
It's a transition from a weighted world of bustle.
(water splashing)
Into this fantastic, peaceful, translucent world.
The reason why I like diving, as an archeologist,
is that when I get down there,
I feel, I see, I touch things.
And so if I can engage with one wreck,
directly through diving, that's the best.
Lying in nearly 100 meters of water,
a 10th-Century byzantine shipwreck,
from a thousand-year Empire that at its height,
ruled much of Europe and the Middle East.
It's the oldest connection to our sea-faring past,
made by one of the largest deep water expeditions
ever undertaken.
(steady music)
In 2015, the maritime archeologist Jon Adams
began a three year mission to discover
how the Black Sea was formed. (waves crashing)
20,000 years ago, this cast sea was a prehistoric lake,
unconnected to the world's oceans.
Large swathes of it was dry land
on which early humans walked.
How it then flooded remains disputed.
(water splashing)
(dispatcher chattering)
Adams has brought together
a team of leading international scientists
to try and solve the puzzle.
This is really going to sound cheesy,
but we really are making history.
(water splashing)
And with some of the most sophisticated
deep water equipment yet developed,
the team also planned to search these unique waters,
for traces of the lost civilizations
who lived and sailed on the Black Sea.
(water bubbling)
They've journeyed to more than two kilometers
below the surface, and made discoveries
that will re-define maritime archeology.
(suspenseful orchestral music)
Perfectly preserve shipwrecks
from history's greatest Empires.
(laughing)
Now, the lost byzantine merchant ship
is the subject of a perilous dive by Jon Adams,
to retrieve an ancient amphorae
from among its timbers.
(rhythmic breathing) (water bubbling)
With every meter a diver descends,
air becomes increasingly toxic.
Jon Adams is diving to 95 meters.
He's breathing a delicate mix of oxygen,
helium, and nitrogen,
to avoid potentially deadly effects
of toxicity and the bends.
(gentle ethereal music) (water bubbling)
Adams and his dive partner, Rasmus Ravnsborg,
are the first to board the byzantine
for more than 1,000 years.
You don't expect to see as much as you do so soon.
It's almost like an artist's reconstruction,
but actually for real.
So I could see the whole array of frames
in the section of planks,
and there's a really nice set of timbers,
they go all the way across the ship, and in fact,
you can see them, actually.
We're just approaching them here.
And essentially, these pristine vertical boards,
this is a BOT cove,
and it looks as though it were made yesterday.
It's absolutely smooth.
There's no tool marks on this wood, either.
So they must've finished it off by scraping.
Adams has just 23 minutes to find the amphorae
and maneuver it onto the ROV.
If he stays any longer,
his return to the surface will become ever more perilous.
Now it's nine minutes.
Jon and the guys.
The ROV has followed
the divers' progress to the wreck.
It'll help with the amphorae's retrieval.
(dispatchers chattering)
Amphorae are made to be carried by the handles
with 20 gallons of liquid inside,
which is a lot of weight.
And in fact, this was full of sediment,
and it was heavier than I thought it would be.
(speaking in foreign language) (light suspenseful music)
(gentle ethereal music)
(people chattering)
This way, yeah.
Recovered from the sea bed after 1,000 years,
the amphorae, once a disposable container,
is now a historical treasure.
Okay, swing in.
It came to the surface.
It came without stress to the amphorae.
The operation is complete.
Now, we can breathe.
(bright ethereal music)
(birds cawing)
Yeah, it went really well.
Kind of it started going up from the sea floor.
(water bubbling)
(gentle music)
You're in this huge great space of water.
This wonderful sort of limpid void.
There down on the sea floor is this
sort of panorama of ancient shipwreck,
and lights, and movement, and technology.
And I just had this sort of panorama in front of me
and I thought, wow, I'm not going now.
I mean, that's one of the most
spectacular moments I've ever had,
I think, in my whole diving career,
looking at that site.
Hovering at about 75 meters,
looking down at 95 meters,
looking down on that site, going,
absolutely amazing.
(light instrumental music)
At the United Kingdom's
National Oceanography Center,
scientists from the expedition
have spent six months trying to settle the argument
over how the Black Sea flooded.
(water rushing)
Last year, they selected 73 sites to call.
(water splashing)
Six meter hollow tubes were pushed into the sea bed.
(saws buzzing)
Once extracted, they contain layers of sediment,
dating back tens of thousands of years.
The scientists hope these sediments
will reveal evidence of the ancient pre-historic lake
that existed before the Black Sea flooded.
That is time travel, isn't it?
That is, that moment, captured just like that.
Early research at one particular core
revealed pre-historic shells,
that would normally be found on a lake shore.
The core containing the shells
was taken nearly 50 kilometers from the coast.
It's evidence of where the pre-historic lake once was,
and how much of the coastal shelf could have been used
by early humans.
The scientists then turn to a different core
to understand how the pre-historic lake then flooded
and became the Black Sea.
It contains layers of sediment stretching back
tens of thousands of years.
The small changes in texture
are the results of fresh water
pouring into the lake. (water trickling)
So the sediments accumulate very slowly,
but what they do is they trap a story in them.
And what you see by the texture of this material
is there are changes in here.
The process that's causing this is actually
a lot of fresh water coming through the rivers,
which will probably be causing flooding events.
(gentle instrumental music)
As the Ice Age ended and the Earth warmed,
the vast rivers, today's Danube, Dniester, and Don,
raised the level of the lake.
So this is our gray lake muds.
Through to the top here,
we have a core connection with the Mediterranean Sea.
So very slowly, over a couple of meters we go
from fresh to full marine.
Found in several cores,
these long continuous layers of gray mud
laid down over thousands of years
are proof that the lake filled slowly with river water.
Before the rising Mediterranean poured in
through the Bosphorus.
(beeping) (machine whirring)
This sudden catastrophic flood,
it's a fantastic idea, and it was a story that
grabbed peoples imagination.
But our data does not support that theory.
(gentle music) (birds chirping)
We would say, quite definitely that,
the process happened much more gradually
than has been proposed in the past.
It wasn't weeks or months.
It was a gradual process over
a period of few thousand years.
And what that process led to
was the Black Sea's eventual connection
with the Mediterranean and ancient Empires
that surrounded it.
Opening up new trade routes for their seafarers to explore.
But so far, the team have not found any shipwrecks
from those ancient civilizations.
43 wrecks were discovered last year,
and the oldest was from the 10th-Century.
The medieval ship may have been
Jon Adam's favorite find from last year,
but he knows that seafarers from both
the Greek and Roman Empires journeyed to the Black Sea
and settled on its shores.
He knows the seas uniquely anoxic waters,
which preserve organic material,
offer his expedition a chance to travel back
deep into the distant past.
Given the size and depth of the Black Sea,
and the intensity of maritime enterprise
that's happened in it and on it
over the last several thousand years,
there will be an enormous amount
of historical and nautical material in the water.
(keys ticking)
So we've only started to nibble away
at what must be down there.
(waves crashing) (gentle music)
(water splashing)
It's the expeditions final voyage
to the Black Sea.
The team has just one month to find evidence
from the lost empires
whose ships once sailed these mysterious waters.
What we all really would like
is to find a pre-Christian Greek ship.
That would really be the thing.
This should be out here somewhere.
Working with Adams
are the Bulgarian archeologists
Kalin Dimitrov and Veso Dragunov.
Scientists who spent years in the Black Sea,
looking for evidence of early civilizations.
The team is on a different ship, The Havila.
She's bigger and even better equipped
than last years survey vessel.
Without bragging, I would say that this is the most
well-equipped survey vessel there is in the world.
So let's use the equipment we have on board.
Let's find those fantastic ships.
That is really gonna be changing stuff.
(speaking in foreign language)
Many of the ROV crew from last year
have volunteered again.
(dispatcher speaking in foreign language)
The remotely operated vehicle
they'll be sending to the sea bed
is at the cutting edge of sub-sea technology.
(motor revving) (water splashing)
And is a natural wreck-hunter.
Controlled through a fiber-optic cable,
the surveyor interceptor can travel
four times faster than other ROVs.
Combined with a powerful sonar,
it allows them to scan much more of the sea floor,
looking for shipwrecks. (light suspenseful music)
Okay.
It'll be Adams' primary weapon of detection.
(speaking in foreign language)
And more than ever,
he'll be in the hands of the ROV pilots
and the survey team.
(water splashing)
Because of the way it's creating--
It just fill it. Yeah.
(steady ticking)
Scientists survey.
Yes survey to legal.
Yeah, we've got a wreck coming through
on the port side of the side scan if you can see there.
I'll send through the coordinates in a second.
Roger that.
(water splashing)
Having detected a signature,
the surveyor is retrieved,
and the schilling ROV with it's array
of cameras and manipulator arms,
will inspect what's down there.
It will take the ROV 40 minutes
to travel the two kilometers to the sea bed.
(speaking in foreign language)
As it descends below 150 meters,
so the water becomes anoxic.
In this dead zone, oxygen disappears,
and organic materials, like ancient wooden timbers, survive.
(chattering in foreign language)
The first wreck is a 200 year old ship
from the time of the Ottomans,
who controlled the Black Sea from the 15th
to the 19th-Century.
So this is the stern. It's the same
as many of the wrecks they found last year.
I don't think we're going
to stand anything off this wreck.
(light suspenseful music)
But as the shilling returns to the surface,
the crews see alarming evidence
of an unexpected danger in the black sea's abyss.
See those detail, all this black stains.
Yes.
They were spotless stainless steel.
What's happened to them?
It's the hostile environment, basically.
The black stains are caused
by poisonous hydrogen sulfite attacking the metal.
It's eating into the ROV.
(water splashing)
This toxic chemical might be the reason
why they have yet to find any ancient wrecks.
It smells like rotten eggs.
You know, the typical smell of sulfur.
It smells really bad.
So we need to wash all our stuff properly.
We have released and go down on 2,000 meters.
They need to be washed thoroughly because otherwise,
you're gonna have all the fittings,
and everything is gonna corrode.
(light suspenseful music)
Hydrogen sulfite is produced
by microscopic bacteria.
These bacteria live in filaments
that cling to the timbers of the wreck.
Some of the scientists now suspect
that as well as producing hydrogen sulfite,
these bacteria are feeding on the wrecks timbers.
We looked at about 41 sites last year.
The oldest one was 10th-Century, byzantine.
This is because the older ones
simply aren't surviving.
There's something in the chemistry of the environment
which keeps them well preserved for 1,000 years or more,
but then after that, they dissolve.
I can't really think that's right.
(steady electronic music) (machine whirring)
(beeping)
Yeah the bottom corner down there.
Just there, that's it, yes.
(crane whirring)
Easy up.
To find out if the bacteria
are slowly destroying the wrecks,
a sample of wood is retrieved for analysis.
(speaking in foreign language)
Accurate.
(birds cawing)
So from this piece of wood,
I will produce this very, very thin section
with a stain that I add.
Then I can take under the microscope,
and I can see what's going on.
The blue dye that's added to the wood sample
will reveal the level and rate of degradation
that the expedition is up against.
(men chattering)
Hello, hello. Oh, hello.
You're here.
Hello, mother.
Yeah, hello.
Welcome.
Yeah, I'm just looking at the small section I just cut.
There you can see the blue one,
they're the greatest cells next to the white ones,
which are fresh.
But sooner or later, this white one will also turn blue.
This is why when we take the samples under water,
there's actually no mechanical strength
left in the wood at all. Yeah,
there's no mechanical strength at all.
And this bacteria that degrades the wood here
are very specialized bacteria.
They will go into the wood,
find the anatomical openings within the fibers.
And from there, they will scratch a little hole,
and they will find all their food.
Okay. (gentle music)
So the wood.
It looks in tact in the water, but it's not.
The cell wall is like a skeleton of the wood.
That's the only part that the bacteria can not degrade,
so that's why still when it's wet,
it still keep out its form.
So here we go.
You can even see it if you use this needle here,
it's a little sharp.
Yeah, goes in easily.
You can just press this by your hands.
And now I suppose that we can, yeah.
We pull it out, yeah. Yeah yeah yeah, yeah.
So it's so soft and spongy, there's not much left really.
(gentle music)
Well the archeologists describe it as well preserved,
and I describe the wrecks as heavily degraded.
Like a honeycomb, they are empty,
and very, very fragile.
(light suspenseful music)
Lying on the sea floor,
the Black Sea's ancient shipwrecks
may be little more than fragile husks from the past,
but they should still be out there.
Jon Adams just hasn't found them.
How the hell did that get out here?
With seven days left
of the multimillion dollar expedition, time is running out.
We're done, yeah.
No thanks.
It suddenly hit me.
With this 2016 season had been so successful,
how on Earth could we possibly hope to equal it,
let alone exceed it.
So that's the moment you wake up at 4:00 in the morning,
saying, you know, we've got a ship carrying 70 people,
millions of pounds of equipment.
And you've got 25 days to do a series
of interrelated and complex tasks,
is there any way I can control this?
And there isn't, really.
(water splashing)
(men chattering in foreign language)
But the Bulgarian archaeologists,
Kalin and Veso, think they can help.
(speaking in foreign language)
Kalin and Veso had more information about stuff.
Yeah, they've got another possible wreck
somewhere like that. They have these two points
that they say every time someone goes out
on a fishing boat, they come back with something.
(gentle music)
Kalin has been tipped off
by local fishermen who say they found evidence
of a wreck nearby.
(birds cawing)
Fishermen had been working their nets in these waters
for thousands of years.
Exploiting the annual Black Sea migrations
of bonito, scad, and anchovy.
(speaking in foreign language)
Now, they've told Kalin
that their nets have been picking up
pieces of ceramics from the sea floor.
(gentle music)
At least two time, a fisherman catch amphoraes
with their nets.
Amphorae were used by the Romans
and the ancient Greeks to transport olive oil,
wine, and fish paste throughout the Mediterranean
and the Black Sea.
Scanning the shallow coastal waters
where the fishermen had worked their nets,
the Havila picks up a new signature.
The Bulgarian fishermen were right.
A single amphorae lies on the sea bed.
(men laughing and clapping)
Brilliant.
(light suspenseful music)
There's little of the wreck left,
but it's evidence that older finds are out there.
The Havila continues on a heading
that keeps them in shallow water,
closer to the coast.
Not sure yet,
but can you make a fixer for me please?
There was anomaly on the port side.
Seeing something out there.
The expedition's luck has finally turned.
(ethereal music)
What's this?
Ah, yes.
That's what it is. There we go.
That's an amphorae. That's what it is.
Yes it is.
Amphorae, dozens of them.
From a Roman cargo ship still in tact
after 2,000 years.
(applauding and laughing)
Good good.
Brilliant.
Okay.
What we have is a complete cargo
of amphorae sitting down there,
still on the decks of the ship that carried it.
So, not bed, eh?
Each of these clay vessels
is a time capsule waiting to be recovered.
Containing clues about the world
from which they and the ship came.
If we recovered an amphorae,
we could have a very quick general idea about
the location, of the production center of the amphorae,
and probably even their contents
and the origin of their ships journey.
At a depth of 95 meters,
it's possible to dive and retrieve and amphorae.
But getting divers back into the water
takes days of preparation.
And the expedition's clock is ticking.
(crane whirring)
Using the ROV and its manipulator arm would be quicker.
But picking up a 2,000 year old clay artifact hydraulically
is fraught with risk.
(men chattering)
Without knowing its precise size and weight,
there's a danger the ROV will break it.
(suspenseful music)
The scientists have an ace up their sleeve.
The surveyor interceptor has a laser scanner,
which can record a perfect blueprint of the wreck,
and the dimensions of the amphorae they want to recover.
(water splashing)
Flying low, the surveyor's laser scans the wreck,
millimeter by millimeter.
The amphorae is 80 centimeters tall,
and 50 centimeters wide.
Big enough to carry 20 liters of olive oil or wine.
Small enough for a grown man to heave on
to a Roman cargo ship.
(speaking in foreign language)
The plan that's been hatched
to retrieve the amphorae
is Scandinavian in its simplicity.
That was not the best method.
If we could modify, say,
one of the suction cups for the toilets,
they must have something like that on lock.
And then get it, suck it, and lift it.
(laughing)
Yeah.
(saw buzzing)
The ROV pilots get to work.
The key components, one plastic hose, and a toilet plunger.
(crane whirring)
Targeting.
(light steady music)
Okey doke.
That's got to work.
(beeping)
(crane whirring)
As we come more, right.
Yeah.
(crane whirring)
(speaking in foreign language)
Unbelievable.
There is a stick here.
A stupid stick here.
A branch.
No no no.
This is it.
Over a little bit.
Oh, it's okay.
Okay, come down a little bit.
(speaking in foreign language)
(laughing)
No no no.
(speaking in foreign language)
Itsy bitsy.
Go in.
Coming down.
(applauding)
Bravo.
(bright music)
(speaking in foreign language)
Lost for nearly 2,000 years,
the amphorae is back on the surface.
A new ship now, and a different crew.
(camera shutter clicking)
Just to the left.
(laughing)
Every single person on this ship now
can relate in a certain way
to every single artifact that we're retrieving,
because it is a piece of our common global heritage,
and the lifetime of our forefathers.
In fact, every artifact you discover
brings you one step closer to the humans
who actually built it, and actually used it and carried it.
It had a meaning for someone.
Amphorae were the ever day vessels
for storing food in ancient times.
And the sea was the cheapest and fastest
means of transporting them across the Roman Empire.
At its height, Rome controlled over half of the Black Sea.
Their ships would journey from the Mediterranean,
to the Black Sea's northern shores,
to trade wine and olive oil for timber and grain.
(waves crashing)
To avoid the treacherous coastline,
the Roman traders would've sailed further out in blue water.
I think we see evidence for blue water sailing
surprisingly early,
and I don't think you could generalize that
at certain periods, seafarers would've hugged the shore
and gone coast hopping and stuff like that.
In most areas of the world,
early evidence suggests they didn't do that.
With less than a week left at sea,
the Havila has changed course.
She's now lying in deeper water,
on an ancient shipping route
that Adams hope early navigators would've used.
And where the Black Sea's anoxic water
should have better preserved the wrecks.
(thunder rumbling)
(suspenseful orchestral music)
(speaking in foreign language)
Within hours of leaving the coastal shelf,
the team pick up a new wreck signature.
Lying more than two kilometers below the surface,
it's one of the deepest wrecks the team has found.
The depth here is 2,067 meters.
That was probably,
historically, archeologically,
that may be our most important moment.
The wreck is on its side,
half buried in the sea bed.
That was a case of seeing things on the wreck
that rang bells.
You could instantly identify,
thinking, I've seen this before somewhere.
Where have I seen that?
We just go in with the top looking down.
It's caught a rudder with a Tennison attached,
was actually sloping into the sea bed,
and it looked really well preserved,
so we decided to expose the whole of the rudder blade
to get its shape.
It's quite often they're a little bit diagnostic.
(steady music)
The design of the rudder
could give Adams an indication of when the ship sailed.
According to ancient iconography,
the straight rudder could mean the wreck is Roman.
So we were sort of expecting a Roman style rudder.
I still can't really believe what we found.
(men chattering) (beeping)
(steady suspenseful music)
(crane whirring)
Oh yes, perfect.
That's lovely.
Keep going toward.
Carry on.
Keep that demon vacuuming going.
For two hours,
the ROV pilots use a vacuum pump
to suck away thick layers of sediment
that have built up around the rudder
over thousands of years.
They've got to the end of the blade,
but it doesn't seem to look like a straight Roman rudder.
Fantastic.
(men chattering and laughing) (camera shutter clicking)
Six feet of sediment has been sucked away
to reveal a curved shaped rudder.
It's not Roman.
It's much older.
From ancient Greece.
Two and a half thousand years ago.
There's a ship design on a pot,
which is called the Siren Vase.
It's actually currently at the British Museum.
It has rudders that are identical in shape
to the one that we exposed that day on the sea bed.
You can see the exact same shape
of the blade of the counter rudder,
resemble very strongly the one
that we just studied and just discovered.
Even the position of the mast in the forequarter of the ship
is very very similar.
So there's very strong evidence to suggest
at this stage of research it dates
probably somewhere in the fifth Century BC or so,
in the classical brick age.
So quite incredible, quite incredible.
This will be the earliest ship that we discovered.
Have you seen something like that before?
Never.
I'm not sure anybody has.
(laughing)
So many aspects of the maritime past
are always slightly vague, undocumented,
and quite often it's the shipwrecks
that provides us with ways of viewing
aspects of history that aren't written down.
So we're now beginning to get
a far deeper understanding of what went on and why.
(motor revving) (birds chirping)
In the historic Bulgarian port of Sozopol,
land-based archeological digs have uncovered
evidence of the ancient Greek colonies
that settled on these shores.
(light music)
A horde of artifacts reveals how 3,000 years ago,
trading Empires from the Mediterranean
began to look east to the Black Sea.
It's a tangible link for maritime archeologists
Drago Garbov and Helen Farr,
to the ancient Greeks who came and lived in Sozopol,
far from their homeland.
So yeah, the ancient Greeks arrived here
in the seventh Century, BC.
So they're coming across,
through the Bosphorus, into the Black Sea,
settling here, and then instantly trading.
Exactly.
I think what came in mostly was exotic foods
and also luxury goods.
These vessels are perfume bottles,
and they contain such strong essences inside
that at the moment we discovered it,
they usually still bare their aroma
of what was inside them. Wow.
This really appeals to me that you can smell something
from that long ago.
What's that?
Oh that's a fish grill.
We find them in interesting contexts.
In fact, most of them have been discovered
on top of graves.
So once a burial would occur,
the relatives or friends of the seas
would come back regularly. Have a party.
Yeah, yeah, to perform rituals and feasts.
And you can see the burning on it as well?
Exactly, well, it's been used.
I know, that really brings into the picture
the fact that these people were living here.
Not just the traders that are coming across from Greece,
but it's families, it's all the elders,
the babies and children.
Yeah, those are lovely things. (gentle music)
Lovely artifacts.
They just drove that home really clearly.
Fabulous.
(waves crashing)
(gentle music)
The expedition has been at sea for 24 days.
And it's taking its toll. (ominous music)
(dispatchers chatting)
Mile upon mile surveyed day and night,
in the hunt for new wrecks.
(coughing)
Okay. Yeah.
We've been doing a really really good project,
but it has been taking a toll,
and especially from the ROV crew.
1,400 of kilometer sea floor mapped,
and they're exhausted now, really.
(saw buzzing)
(hose hissing) (saw buzzing)
(dispatchers chattering)
I was tired at the end,
but I wasn't weary in the sense of,
we've done it, we've done enough, I wanna go home.
If we'd had another 10 days at sea
to do more of the same, I would've grabbed it.
(speaking in foreign language)
There are only two days to go,
and Jon Adams won't let up.
The Black Sea is a huge repository
of historically important wrecks.
We've now looked at probably about 60
in the last three years.
And we've only just scratched the surface.
(gentle music)
The Black Sea preserves wrecks
in remarkable condition.
But they've yet to make a find
that offers a perfect window to the past.
(sonar beeping)
Scientists survey.
We've got a wreck coming through
on the scan at 42 degrees, 04.
Five three north.
Thank you.
There is time, just,
for one more discovery.
(men chattering)
(speaking in foreign language)
As we came towards it,
it was one of those images resolving out of the murk.
And then you're looking at an in tact hull.
Your immediate reacting is, oh well it's in tact.
It must be modern.
And then as we came towards the stern of the wreck,
we recognized a quarter rudder.
And then it started to dawn on us.
The quarter rudders, the style of the planking,
the position of the mast, the whole shape of the hull.
I'm looking at a ship that's 2,000 years old,
and it's still complete.
And it's got rope still tied to its mast
and hanging off the side.
(laughing)
You run out of words. (bright orchestral music)
The wreck is Roman,
dating from the first Century AD.
No one has even seen an ancient shipwreck like this.
Still so in tact and so well preserved.
That's astonishing.
Absolutely astonishing.
The feeling of looking at something like that,
just standing there in front of you.
That moment of revelation,
it's that moment of truth,
it's that moment of discovery.
That's a feeling you can't really describe.
Big beam in the bow, near the back.
Traditionally,
archeologists have relied on classical iconography
to try to understand Roman seafaring.
Not anymore.
We're 21 meters, and still going.
Wow.
When you see the size of the shipwreck,
all of a sudden your mind just goes,
I had no idea it was that big.
This was not just the fishermen
going up and down the coast.
This was a serious business.
And this is the kind of things
that we're interested in in archeology,
is giving that richness, that texture,
to human lives, human past lives.
(bright orchestral music)
What we have is a complete ship sitting down there.
It's a spectacular find.
And when we tie it down,
it's probably one of the most important
ship wreck finds ever.
Layer by layer,
the three year expedition has unearthed
the ancient past of the Black Sea.
Revealing histories of people
who faced a changing climate,
and sailed the high seas in search of Empire and fortune.
Yeah, we've got a wreck coming through
on the port side of the side scanner.
More than 60 wrecks discovered.
A medieval ship that Marco Polo might have sailed on.
Stunning, my God, look at that.
A huge Roman cargo vessel
that was trading 2,000 years ago.
(applauding)
An ancient Greek ship,
that plied these waters when Plato was alive.
Have you seen something like that?
I'm not sure anybody has.
(laughing)
Further back in time,
the debate over how and when the Black Sea flooded
has been settled.
Not a catastrophic or Biblical flood,
but a slow inundation,
as the pre-historic lake was filled.
First by the great rivers that drain into it,
and finally, (waves crashing)
as the rising Mediterranean poured in.
(birds cawing)
Years ago, archeologists,
even if they were working on the coastal side,
they wouldn't look out to see.
They'd turn resolutely in land,
looking for the answers from the material
that they could get out there.
We now know that the sea is so important
that you really need to turn around and look out to sea.
The answers actually, in many cases, are out there.
The depths of this unparalleled sea
have revealed touchstones of our ancient past.
Reminders of who we are, and how we once lived,
thousands of years ago.
(gentle orchestral music)