Original subtitles

(contemplative music)

The sea for me has a fascination.

I like being on the sea, I sleep better on a boat.

I like the smell of it, the taste of it.

And so it's somewhere where I'm happy.

Yeah the depth there is 261 meters.

261, well done.

As the ROV moves in, there's always this moment,

the green haze of water gradually resolves into this shape

and you start seeing timbers.

I feel this uncontrollable sort of surge of excitement.

Finding shipwrecks like that is breathtaking.

You're thinking, I wonder what's this gonna be.

(contemplative music)

(bright music)

Sailing east at six knots,

the 3000 ton Stril Explorer

heads into the mysterious waters of the Black Sea.

She's making for a set of coordinates

off the Bulgarian coast.

(speaking in foreign language)

On board, and international team of scientists,

lead by Jon Adams, one of the maritime archeologists

who raised King Henry VIII's flagship, the Mary Rose.

We have some good target areas

that we would like to get a little bit more information

but these are the selected locations

and what we've done is we've given the coordinates

to the bridge.

We're steaming off to do the first one now.

More used to battling the storms

of the North Sea for the oil industry,

the high-tech Scandinavian survey vessel

will be the operational centerpiece of the expedition.

Bridge deck?

Go ahead.

Yeah, just let us secure the leg.

Okay, thank you.

10:15, okay.

We're heading straight towards where we said we'd be.

(dynamic music)

The Stril Explorer is incredible ocean-going survey vessel.

With all the systems that anybody could possibly need.

If I was to design a vessel and equipment

to do deep-water archeology, this is it.

For the next four weeks,

home, family, life on land will take a back seat

in a quest to uncover the story of the Black Sea.

(dynamic music)

(waves lapping)

This vast sea was once a prehistoric lake,

unconnected to the world's oceans.

How it then flooded remains disputed.

Some scientist have argued there was a catastrophic deluge

which inspired the Biblical flood story.

Along its shores they've found evidence of early humans

who settled here, worked the land, discovered gold.

In the sea's hidden depths, archeologist believe

there may be evidence of ancient seafaring.

Shipwrecks from long lost empires

that could date back 3,000 years

to when the Greeks first landed on the Black Sea's shores.

Until now, this sea has remained little explored.

Flanked by six countries, the Black Sea was,

for much of the 20th century,

hidden behind the Iron Curtain.

For the next three years Jon Adams and his team

will search for evidence of the lost civilizations

and the ancient peoples who lived and sailed

on this mysterious sea.

The whole area is an archeological hotspot

in terms of what we know about ancient civilizations

along its shores.

And in theory we would expect tremendously exciting

remains from past cultures underwater as well.

(contemplative music)

Adams' right hand man is Kroum Batchvarov,

one of the few maritime archeologist ever

to have worked on a Black Sea shipwreck.

This is going to sound cheesy

but we really are making history.

The shipwrecks that we're likely to find,

they're thousands upon thousands of years of seafaring

in this region and we know virtually nothing about it.

Helen Farr specializes in prehistory,

uncovering the worlds in which ancient peoples lived.

Understanding that human narrative against the backdrop

of this changing landscape of sea level rise

is really important for understanding where we've come from,

who we are, what makes humans human.

It's something that people are really engaged with.

ROV submit.

Managing the team's state of the art

imaging systems is maritime archeologist

Rodrigo Pacheco-Ruiz.

The Black Sea has never been explored this way.

It's virgin territory.

There's very little archeology done here.

You know this is the biggest museum in the world.

And it's all underwater so, a lot of exciting stuff.

(speaking in foreign language)

Ah, here's Jon.

Are we ready?

Almostish?

My estimate is about another 30, 35 minutes.

Excellent. Good.

All right.

(speaking in foreign language)

Stril Explorer, Stril Explorer.

(speaking in foreign language)

Just for information we are conducting sub-sea operation.

Can you keep clear of us one nautical mile please?

Thank you very much.

Okay I will be clear of you one--

The Stril reaches the coordinates

where sonar has located a signature at 300 meters.

But what's down there, no one is sure.

Alongside the scientists is a team of deep sea surveyors,

equipped with the latest laser and sonar technology.

And six pilots for the remotely operated vehicles or ROVs.

Linked to the ship by a fiber-optic cable,

the Supporter ROV can reach depths of nearly 2000 meters.

Gliding through the water with the touch of a joystick.

Y'all are ready?

Yes ready, ready, take it away guys.

All stations ROV off deck.

(intense music)

(bubbles gurgling)

Bridge, confirm I have a green light for diving?

Yes you have.

Thank you, Colin out.

Adams' command post is the ROV pilot's cabin.

The Supporter's eight cameras will open a window

to an undiscovered world.

Calibrating the camera yeah,

and then getting the lights right.

Okey dokey.

Let me know.

As it descends,

the Supporter gets closer and closer

to what makes the Black Sea unique.

At a depth of 150 meters, oxygen in the water disappears.

The sea becomes a dead zone.

Go up?

Yeah, the depth here is 261 meters.

261, well dumno.

Come on guys.

(otherworldly music)

(serene music)

You told me to tell you.

Again, that camera.

Ooo, look at that.

It's stunning, my god!

Look at that.

Oh this is beautiful.

Oh this is absolutely beautiful.

Much of the wreck has been preserved.

The wooden balustrades around the quarter-deck.

The ropes for working the sails.

In other seas, most of this wreck would not have survived.

That's quite a lot of rope.

Oh yes.

That's brilliant.

Look at the mast leaning against the beam.

Yeah absolutely, absolutely.

But have you seen the carving?

Oh the carving, it's all over the place.

Absolutely beautiful.

The carved patterns of flowers and vines

are Islamic.

The ship would have sailed during the Ottoman Empire.

Probably around 300 years ago.

Its just unbelievable, it's just unbelievable.

I just.

You ever see that?

No, no, no.

Not live, not doing it now.

It's down there, 300 meters.

We are discovering it, we are looking at it.

Now for the first time.

(gentle music)

Three centuries ago,

the Black Sea was a prized possession of the Ottoman Empire.

Merchant ships plied their trade along its coastline.

A vital supply line for the Ottoman capital, Constantinople.

Today's Istanbul.

Within a century of its capture, close to 700,000 people

lived in this teeming city.

Feeding the growing population was a priority

for the Ottoman rulers.

Ports at the mouths of the great rivers

that fed into the Black Sea from Russia and Europe

were vital trading post and were quickly captured.

An armada of small traders began to ferry vital supplies

back to Constantinople.

Some ships, their hulls laden with grain from the Balkans,

precious metals from the Caucuses, never made it home.

In theory, shipwrecks that come to rest

in 300 meters of water should be well preserved

but we didn't really know.

So the first time we started to see an Ottoman wreck,

that was a moment.

It really is like this and we can see wonderful things

all over the bottom of this sea potentially.

(horn bellowing)

(speaking in foreign language)

The expedition to the Black Sea

began 12 months earlier on a Greek survey ship, the Aegaeo.

(contemplative music)

Adams' mission was to settle a scientific argument

that has divided archeology for decades.

How the Black Sea flooded.

Using a sonar device called a tow-fish

which emits powerful pulses of sound,

the team surveys the sea floor.

(ticking)

The sounds pulses penetrate the seabed,

feeding back a detailed profile of the prehistoric landscape

that once existed.

(contemplative music)

20,000 years ago, the Black Sea looked very different.

In the grip of the last ice age,

global sea levels were much lower

and the Black Sea was a smaller fresh water lake.

Early humans probably lived and hunted on its shores.

At the moment we are more or less steaming

over the paleo shoreline.

In other words, from here in that way

towards land of Bulgaria which we can see on the horizon,

everything was dry land once upon a time.

(contemplative music)

For decades, most geologist agree

that as the ice age ended,

fresh water from the surrounding river poured into the lake.

Over thousands of years, it slowly filled up.

Eventually the lake reached the Bosphorus

and began to mix with seawater from the Mediterranean.

Creating the Black Sea that exists today.

Then in 1997, the theory was challenged

by two American scientists, Walter Pittman and William Ryan.

They argued that there was little change

to the prehistoric lake until a few thousand years ago

when the rising seawater level of the Mediterranean

burst through the Bosporus.

The theory sparked huge public interest

recalling Noah and the Biblical flood.

(contemplative music)

In three weeks of surveying with the towfish,

the team creates a map of the ancient buried landscape.

The first step in uncovering how the Black Sea formed.

(waves lapping)

Using a second towfish, the team begin a new search.

This time, they're looking for shipwrecks.

In most oceans, ancient ships have long disappeared.

Their wooden timbers eaten by shipworm

as on this 2,000 year old Greek wreck.

But in the Black Sea,

because oxygen below 150 meters disappears,

the water is anoxic and doesn't support life

such as shipworm.

It could mean that ships from long ago empires

still might exist on the seabed.

It's probably part of a barge.

This is the first one that really

sprang out of the screen at us screaming shipwreck.

Even if it's recent this could actually be a really,

really interesting find.

And this is the deepest one, almost 300 meters, 278.

This one's very interesting, that's really good.

We've got collapsed beams and all sorts of things.

You've certainly got what looks like structural timbers

all the way around.

In a way I think it's the most interesting.

(dynamic music)

(speaking in foreign language)

The Stril is heading further out to sea

to deeper water

where the team hope that older wrecks may still lie.

Untouched for perhaps thousands of years.

You can never tell where the ancient shipwrecks will be

but we go down below 150 meters,

preservation becomes dramatically better.

So if you're looking for ancient shipwrecks,

look in the deeper water.

You might get lucky and find some really early stuff.

(contemplative music)

Online and ROV this is bridge.

We are starting position, ready to start whenever you are.

We copy.

We copy.

Latch open, stand by.

Stand by.

Stand by.

The wreck signature they'll inspect

will take the ROV deeper than it's ever been before,

1,800 meters.

A 40 minute journey to the seabed.

My personal favorite on the wishlist

is a medieval Byzantine shipwreck.

If we find one of those ships I'll be very happy.

(pensive music)

There it is, yeah.

This definitely looks like from the 17th century

Eastern Mediterranean cargo vessel.

That would explain the straight sternpost.

Like the earlier find,

the ship is from the Ottoman Period,

from two to three hundred years ago.

Okay, might as well Cathx.

Ready for contacts? Yeah.

Cathx is one of the ROV's high definition cameras

which photographs the wreck in minute detail.

And it's part of a revolutionary method in surveying wrecks

in deep water, called photogrammetry.

We capture a series of stills at the frame rate

of three every second.

So from this wreck we managed to get 700 photos.

So that's a lot of high resolution photography.

The software stitches it together basically

and you start getting a much better idea

of details of the ship.

The levels of technology have become so advanced.

The things that we used to dream of

as methods of three dimensional recording

things underwater with speed and accuracy now are here.

So to a certain extent you can do an awful lot

sitting in a control, Brian with a cup of coffee in one hand

and a joystick in the other.

Now it's fantastic.

With the image now stitched together,

the team have the precise dimensions of the ship.

Can record every timber, and in this case,

identify every artifact that might otherwise stay hidden.

From the photogrammetry model,

there appears to be an object wedged under a timber

near the stern of the wreck.

You see 'em?

Yes sir.

Stand by. Stand by.

Using the fiberoptically controlled

manipulator arm, the ROV pilot, Brian Garr,

begins the challenging process of retrieving the artifact.

(suspenseful music)

There's an old expression that archeologist

don't dig up things but people.

But it's the things that allow us to get to the people.

Easy out.

We are faced with the material evidence.

The immediacy of that is what fills your brain initially.

And then we start thinking about the people

and wondering what happened.

Most of those shipwrecks out there,

there's no obvious reason that they sunk.

They're on the bottom of the sea.

They probably went down in bad storms.

It would have been a very dire situation to be in.

Well done.

(crew applauding)

What we are looking at is two clay braziers.

On the left one we see traces of burning

and traces of concreted ashes and charcoal

which comes to show that the brazier was actively used.

In fact when we discovered it it was still full of ashes.

So yeah, this brazier probably contained

the remains of the last meal that was eaten

on board the boat.

(waves crashing)

(contemplative music)

You're talking to these people.

They suddenly become alive.

They are right next to you.

For Kroum Batchvarov

ships are the closest possible connection

to long lost empires.

A way to understand the past and its people.

For more than two years he's been working on the Vasa,

a 17th century Swedish warship.

If you study the timbers properly

you're going to see the marks from the tools.

You will learn to recognize their signature on the

by the way they use their tools.

Batchvarov has been painstakingly examining

each timber of the ship's frame,

carefully reconstructing how the Vasa was built.

It is the first time that we are really

developing an understanding how the shipwrights

put her together.

There are not two timbers that are exactly the same

aboard the ship or that are even universally squared.

The capability of dealing with

complicated engineering problems

this is telling something about the mental state

of these people.

How much they understood the forces

that were acting upon their ships.

How did they solve the problem of creating a regularly

operational vessel that was safe,

that made it sure it will bring its cargo

and preferably also its crew back home

at the end of the voyage.

(suspenseful music)

In the case of the Vasa,

disaster struck on its maiden voyage.

Human error causing it to sink before it had left

Stockholm Harbor.

When it was raised 60 years ago,

archeologists found that the ship, buried in sediment,

had been largely preserved.

Seeing the ship the first time was

the closest to a religious experience that I've ever had.

To me it was entering a cathedral,

medieval gothic cathedral.

That sense of awe, that overwhelming feeling,

has never left me.

Survey Bridge?

Yes go ahead.

We are okay to start operations

and we are also on position.

For over two weeks the Stril has been at sea.

Scientists, surveyors, and ROV pilots working day and night.

(phone trilling)

Must be hard

to keep in touch with your daughters Joakim.

Yeah, this is life at sea Horowitz.

When you have the time to call

they might be doing something else.

There's nothing you can do about it.

Hey, it's Mommy.

Hello.

Hello.

Are you miss me?

(laughing) Yeah, I do.

Do you miss me?

I heard that Aunty Dandelion

came and painted your fingernails.

Just time to be honest.

I think it's kind of normally when she'd be asleep

lying in bed.

(child crying) That's okay.

Okay, bye.

The hunt for shipwrecks goes on.

All right, 10 meters to go.

But the team is struggling to find

anything older than Ottomans from around 300 years ago.

Ah, not another one.

Oh yeah.

Same old, same old.

Ah, dear oh dear.

It's yet another one.

It's another one to add to our fleet.

Accept for all--

I think it's a smaller example

than some of the bigger ones that we've seen

but it's the same generic type.

It's disappointing. (chuckling)

None of the discoveries of the ancient wrecks

the deeper anoxic water would hold.

(mechanical pulsing)

ROV Surveyor.

Hello Surveyor.

Were we not just at this shipwreck?

(all chuckling)

You hear the official designation of this sort of ship

the IKEA wreck because they're all the same

and they come virtually flat-packed. (chuckling)

Each inspection takes time,

as much as six hours.

It's eating into the schedule.

They can't take shortcuts.

Every wreck could be the ancient ship they're looking for.

Priced at 20 million dollars, the expedition

has high expectations of making ancient discoveries.

In these this case there's so much money involved,

there's so many people involved as well

and there's a lot of stress, there's a lot of tension.

There's only one chance.

It's uneconomic to get it wrong, basically, at this scale.

There's a lot of pressure, there's a lot of pressure

to get it right. Yeah.

(suspenseful music)

Right, same stuff.

Bloody hell.

That's what it is, archeology is like that.

You just have to work with what you have

but it'll be nice to have something else.

Oh dear oh dear.

Okay, time to leave the crime scene.

Time is running out.

Jon Adams needs more than IKEA wrecks.

(squeaking)

(garbled radio chatter)

He also still has to determine

exactly how and when the Black Sea flooded.

It will take much of the Stril's resources

and many days of ship time.

Surveyor, the report at the surface.

Everything good here, thank you.

Crane you can lower it down.

Copy that, go down.

Armed with last year's map

of the buried landscape

the team selects specific sites on the seabed to core.

(splashing)

(otherworldly music)

Six meter long hollow tubes are lowered onto the seabed,

then pushed into the soft mud.

Once extracted, they'll contain a core of sediment

that could date back tens of thousands of years.

(auto-hammer pounding)

This is fantastic.

A full six meters of consolidated sediment.

What you're looking at here contains all the evidence

for how the environment was at the time

and how it changed over time

and that will hopefully help us to address

some of the big debates.

When it happened, how it happened, and what effects it had

on human populations living in the region at the time.

73 sites have been selected

along the shallow coastal shelf

and further out in deeper water.

The team hopes the cores contain evidence

of the prehistoric lake shore,

the first step in understanding when and how

the inundation happened.

(mechanical whirring)

There you go. Not too bad.

Some nice shell material.

Bit of shell there. Right.

In this core, thick mud sits at the top

but further back in time, towards the bottom,

mixed in with the sediment are pieces of shell.

They could be evidence of the lake's prehistoric coastline.

Oh yes.

So we see that and we go huh, that looks familiar,

that looks like a beach.

Why is that underwater?

Well it's ancient beach from before it got submerged.

So if I can understand where that coastline was

then we can start looking at that coastline,

thinking about it.

What was the geography in the past of the Black Sea?

With 73 cores to extract,

every hour of daylight is precious

and that means the search for wrecks

has to go on through the night.

ROV Olag can you just set up the ROV

on the line, your heading turn--

In the early hours of the morning,

after three weeks at sea,

the team finally finds new wreck signature.

I'd given up and gone to bed

'cause I'd been up for about 24 hours

and lo and behold the phone rings.

They said Jon, Jon, do you want to see something different?

What have we got?

Do a couple more flyovers with this unit.

Just do it, just to indulge me.

Wide angle please.

Yeah sure.

And just a touch higher.

Okay.

Perfect, perfect.

Okay, off we go.

The eeriness of the mast

just sticking out of he darkness, incredible.

Beautiful stuff Colin. Yes.

Do I see tool-marks on that stem?

Can we just, can we just take a little bit of a lower

look down this as we come around?

The new wreck isn't an Ottoman.

It's older.

500 years older.

A merchant ship, most likely built in Italy.

We're looking at a date, around probably 1,200-1,400,

something like that.

And we find pictures of them or reliefs

carved in churches and things but this is the first time

anybody's seen anything like this.

The thing for real, almost intact.

It's amazing.

It's the sort of ship that Marco Polo might have sailed on.

When the great medieval explorer Marco Polo

returned in 1295 to Venice from 24 years in the east,

he traveled home by sail.

His last sea leg was across the Black Sea

on a ship much like this.

Then you start thinking well,

the last time that ship was seen

was probably the last time those people saw anything.

What would that have been like for them?

It must have been terrifying.

Suddenly it becomes about group of peoples'

very real demise.

And then we were finished and the ROV just drew back.

Suddenly I thought there but the grace of god go I.

(contemplative music)

Lifting a wreck of this age to the surface

would cost tens of millions of dollars.

3D photogrammetry means they don't have to.

Archeologist now have digital tools with which

to explore the wrecks.

Long after the ROV has left the seabed.

That little Mediterranean ship probably built in Venice

or somewhere like that gives us a way into history

that we can't get by any other means.

If you look at the ships in Northern Europe in the 1500s,

like the Mary Rose, that's the other end of the process.

So the Mediterranean ship that we found is the before

and the Mary Rose is the after.

(splashing)

Point the jib west.

Jib west, roger, stand by.

Jib west.

That's that way.

Jon Adams began work on raising the Mary Rose

in the late 1970s.

It quickly became the biggest maritime archeological project

ever undertaken and revealed the ship as a unique document

detailing life in Medieval England.

(contemplative music)

I can picture myself as though it was yesterday.

Being inside this amazing structure.

All the guns were still in place at the time we found them

and there were shot and ropes and longbows

and all sorts of other stuff lying around.

In fact you could swim at one point

from one end of the main deck to the other.

Past all these guns, looking down at the guns

still pointing out through the gun-ports.

And it was just the most amazing experience.

The more we learnt about the ship the more it surprised us.

The ingenuity of the way in which the

internal space was organized and the fixtures and fittings

and the rig and all the other equipment

including of course, the guns.

The ingenuity of how to create this complex floating society

in this structure of thousands of components.

This was a new thing for Europe at the time.

Medieval Europe was changing

from a patchwork of small city states

to powerful nations ruled by monarchies.

Henry the VIII personally paid for the construction

of the Mary Rose.

A potent symbol of his and England's status.

Ships can be seen at this period

as the tools of state-building

because they're now the new form of castle.

They're floating castles, you can take your power

where you want them.

Now when we look at that Italian ship in the Black Sea,

that is the stage of maritime technological development

before this process of technological change happens.

19,000 artifacts were uncovered

from the Mary Rose.

Each one adding to an intimate portrait of life

lived 500 years ago.

(pensive music)

A shipwreck is an accident and it's a floating society

therefore it contains not only the ship,

its technology, its fixtures, its fittings, its rig.

The personal possessions of the crew, their equipment.

You've got this whole complex structure

and all the objects of those people on board.

When you look at a shipwreck you have the best way

of getting at the people that is possible really.

55 meters at 332 bearing.

55 meters at 332 degrees, drop them off?

Drop them off.

Back on the Stril,

something's gone wrong with the latest dive.

When you come to a stop on the vessel

then we'll see if it gets it in again.

Copy that.

Now there's a really, really bad current there

so I would try to turn.

Yes there is.

Can you do a fix on there now?

Yep, sure bridge.

Say again please.

Yes bridge.

Winch away.

Yeah you need to know this is a critical situation.

We're trying to get up and I need to you to speak up

on the coms please.

500 meters down there's a problem with the ROV.

We lost our hydro-acoustic positioning.

It's there but it's not coming up.

Zero depth so I'm not too sure what's up there.

Don't trust this position because definitely

we're not getting anything.

Right.

The Supporter's positioning beacon has broken.

There's several million dollars worth of submersible

out there, somewhere.

(thunder rumbling)

We have a loop of 760 meter of cable now

and we have only 470 meter under the boat

so we cannot just pull in on the loop.

The current has dragged the ROV

nearly half a kilometer out to sea.

But in which direction, no one knows.

Can't really see the cable.

(garbled radio chatter)

Jovan can you get one of the guys on the bridge

to go out and have a look on the miracle cable

and tell me which directions it's going?

If the Supporter is lost,

it'll put a stop to the expedition's hunt for wrecks.

ROV Surveyor?

Yes.

Yeah we have your positioning about 400 meters

from the vessel.

We need to track that to the vessel.

(winch whirring)

Flying blind, all Brian Garr can do

is slowly reel the ROV back onboard.

Without crashing it into the ship's hull.

You see now we're coming up quite fast.

Maybe we lost it, maybe we lost it.

(dramatic music)

(cable straining)

All stations are re-up and back.

(cheering and applauding)

I'm so relieved. (chuckling)

I had this horror of sort of going along

with these sort of millions and millions of pounds

worth of equipment.

Ah.

You take that end.

The coring of the Black Sea

in search of the prehistoric coastline is nearly complete.

Most of the 73 cores have been extracted

from the shallow coastal shelf and from deeper waters.

They've all been sorted but they now need to go

back in a crate and away.

One will attract particular interest, core 59.

(contemplative music)

At the U.K.'s National Oceanography Center

scientist from the expedition have found evidence

of the prehistoric lake.

As you can see we've got almost four meters of pure shell.

If we take a sample from here we have a real mixture.

You can see that we have some, slightly more intact shells,

some that's slight broken, and then we have this

completely ground down shell within it

and this is really where what's happened is

wave energy in a dynamic environment has basically

churned this around.

Breaking 'em down into almost what looks like,

in some places, like as sand

and that's really good evidence that we're on the edge

of the Black Sea Lake as it was then.

Taken 60 kilometers off the present day coast,

the core gives a precise location of the prehistoric lake.

It's shores would have been surrounded by tens of thousands

of square kilometers of dry land that is now submerged.

That takes you to pretty much where

it begins to start dropping off into the real depths.

For Helen Farr, the results could be evidence

of how early humans might have existed on this land.

So that's a large amount of continental shelf here.

That would have been possibly inhabited,

crossed by people that were looking for

the resources that they needed to live.

The Black Sea was a great environment.

You've got rich areas which would have had game

and things to hunt.

You've got fish resources, you've got stone,

so you've got all the things that you really need

to be successful.

Now the scientist need to resolve how

this vast expanse of prehistoric land flooded.

Slowly or catastrophically.

Would people notice it, would that affect people's lives?

What about if it was catastrophic?

How quick is catastrophic?

(gentle music)

55 meters at 332 degrees.

Drop them off?

Drop them off.

All stations ROV off deck.

There's a new find.

Sitting in the shallow waters

of the Bulgarian coastal shelf.

It looks interesting.

I'm refusing to get excited until I know that it's not

a fiberglass replica that's fallen off a container ship

on it's way to a fairground in Georgia or somewhere

so I'm just, you know, not going to allow myself

to get excited.

I mean it could be all sorts of things.

It's just that it looks as though it could be special.

(suspenseful music)

(contemplative music)

Right, we wanna be in there somewhere.

Cheers.

ROV copy, stand by.

20 seconds.

(pensive music)

There is a big-- Something looming.

Yeah.

Here we go. I knew it.

When we came into the wreck

you immediately got the feeling

that this was a wreck that had been down there

many centuries.

So we had a ship on the seabed

with structures still poking through the seabed.

More or less upright because the shape we could see

in the multi-beam was symmetrical.

So it wasn't on one side, it wasn't smashed up.

And the shape of it looked unlike

sort of post-medieval ships

so we suspected it could be earlier.

Inches, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Okay, so if we just pull back again

and look down on the whole thing.

And what's this coming up here?

Ah yes!

(laughing)

Embedded in the sediment is and amphorae.

An ancient clay vessel used for transporting wine

and olive oil.

As we looked at it from more and more angles

it became more and more obvious

that it was some sort of Byzantine type

which immediately puts it into the sort of

maybe 1,000 years old or something.

It's the oldest wreck they've found.

A merchant ship from Byzantine Empire.

Starting a new page in history

we just turned today.

I could not be happier.

It might be 1,000 years old

but no one can date the wreck precisely.

The amphorae could hold the answer.

If they could retrieve it they can date it more closely.

Well for all of us.

For Jon Adams, the Byzantine at 95 meters

is close enough to touch.

Which gasses we would use.

And diving onto the wreck

would give the maritime archeologist

the chance to inspect the ancient ship first-hand.

You can do a lot with ROVs these days

and of course the photogrammetry is a fantastic way

of recording these things in three dimensions.

Incredibly quickly.

But as an archeologist, to actually dive on a shipwreck site

I always learn more than I could remotely.

And I always understand more as a result.

(splashing)

Going down there yourself just gives it an extra,

there's an extra sort of ah, I see, I understand that.

But such a deep dive is dangerous.

(water sloshing) (hoist whirring)

Going to small deep is like which gasses we would use.

Are we gonna--

At the safety meeting,

there are worries that the dive is too risky.

95 meters is a substantial dive

and it calls a medic on board for any hurt

damage people divers.

And we have the safety divers that will also assist in this.

If the safety divers are hovering in 20

and the diver needs to be recovered from the bottom

or assisted, what do we do between 60 and 20 meters?

Yeah and that's-- That's the problem.

It's a bit tricky in this kind of situation.

The first thing here to do is just make the air breathing.

Then we'll see and go up a little bit

because even when you're full of helium

if you go up so fast you bring body.

You're talking about the diving equivalent

of having had a heart attack

driving a car a 70 miles an hour on a motorway.

I'm mean, you know, it's easy death.

If Jon Adams dives, and anything goes wrong,

the entire expedition will be jeopardized.

(uplifting music)

It's the final year of the expedition.

The team are back on the Black Sea.

On a bigger boat in the quest to discover

if there are even older shipwrecks.

Sending the ROVs down to even deeper water.

What's this, what's this?

The team make a series of groundbreaking finds.

Roman wrecks from the 2nd century A.D.

More intact than any Roman ship ever found.

A complete cargo of amphora still on the decks

of the ship that carried it.

I mean it's probably one of the most

important shipwreck finds ever.

And they discover a Greek ship

that would have sailed these waters

two and a half thousand years ago.

(gentle music)