Researchers have reportedly discovered a shipwreck from hundreds of years ago during the execution of the Mission Mjøsa project. The mission “aims to map the 140-square-mile (363-square-kilometer) lake bed using high-resolution sonar technology.”
Estimated to date between the 1300s and 1800s, the vessel is reportedly in perfect condition.
The mission was led by the Norwegian Defence Research Establishment “two years after performing several remotely operated vehicle, or ROV, inspections of areas of the lake where large amounts of munitions had been dumped.”
Øyvind Ødegård, a senior researcher in marine archaeology at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology and the mission’s principal investigator said: “My expectation was that there could also be shipwrecks discovered while we were mapping dumped munitions — that turned out to be the case…It was just purely that the statistical chance of finding shipwrecks that were well preserved was considered to be fairly high.”
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According to Taylor Nicioli, “the freshwater environment and lack of wave activity at that depth had kept the vessel in pristine condition, except for corrosion of a few iron nails at each end of the ship.”
“In the stern section of the vessel, there are indications that there is a central rudder, a feature used for steering, which typically appeared no earlier than the late 13th century. Combining those two features, archaeologists were able to estimate the ship’s construction as occurring no earlier than 1300 and no later than 1850,” Nicioli writes.
Ødegård added that: “Wooden shipwrecks can be very well preserved in freshwater, since they lack the organisms that usually eat wood that are found, for instance, in the ocean.”
