When \u00d8yvind \u00d8deg\u00e5rd set out last June to scour the seafloor near Svalbard\u2014a vast, ice-covered Norwegian archipelago halfway between continental Norway and the North Pole\u2014he had a dream.<\/p>\n
A marine archaeologist at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology, \u00d8deg\u00e5rd has worked for decades to protect Norway\u2019s underwater cultural heritage\u2014the shipwrecks and other artifacts that lie, for most archaeologists, literally out of sight and out of mind. His dream was to discover, in these Arctic waters, wrecks that might rival those of the Franklin Expedition, found in Canada\u2019s high Arctic in 2014 and 2016. Those ships, the HMS Erebus <\/em>and HMS Terror,<\/em> were so well preserved that after 170 years, divers found individual hairs entangled in combs.<\/p>\n \u00d8deg\u00e5rd had reason to dream big: from the 1600s onward, thousands of European whaling vessels ventured to Svalbard to exploit its bowhead whale population, and at least 600 never left. Instead, they were entombed in crushing sea ice or sunk by rival fleets. Finding them could cast new light on an underexplored part of European history.<\/p>\n \u201cMost European Arctic history from this period happened on ships, not land,\u201d says \u00d8deg\u00e5rd. \u201cThe only physical remains that can tell us a story about these lives will come from wrecks.\u201d<\/p>\n \u00d8deg\u00e5rd set off aboard the Arctic University of Norway\u2019s (UiT) R\/V Helmer Hanssen<\/em> last summer, with the aim of finding Dutch ships sunk by the French in the 17th century. Using historical reports made to France\u2019s King Louis XIV, \u00d8deg\u00e5rd and his team pinpointed promising spots. But when they deployed underwater drones for a closer look, they not only failed to find Franklin-esque wrecks\u2014they found nothing at all.<\/p>\n The absence suggested an awful possibility: the wrecks\u2014which no one had attempted to find in the past\u2014had been there, but had vanished. The suspected culprit? Shipworms, one of the world\u2019s most voracious destroyers of underwater heritage.<\/p>\n Not a worm at all, shipworms are tunneling, tube-shaped mollusks that thrive on cellulose. A sizable infestation can destroy a sunken ship in just a few years, exposing to the elements the trove of historical treasures contained inside, from human remains to archaeological artifacts.<\/p>\n Shipworms have long been a recognized archaeological threat, but before 2016 no one realized they could endanger the abundant but unexplored wreckage sprawled across the Arctic seafloor, where it was assumed to be far too cold for them to thrive. That year, however, UiT marine biologist J\u00f8rgen Berge led an expedition (which also included \u00d8deg\u00e5rd) to the water off Svalbard to investigate a Norwegian whaler called the Figaro<\/em>, the world\u2019s northernmost-known wreck. The Figaro<\/em> appeared in good shape. But during the expedition, the team also hauled up a seven-meter tree trunk riddled with live shipworms.<\/p>\n The idea that shipworms may be threatening Arctic wrecks was reinforced in 2019 when \u00d8deg\u00e5rd\u2019s team found boreholes in wood collected from Svalbard beaches. A closer inspection of the Figaro<\/em> also turned up previously missed evidence of shipworm infestation.<\/p>\n Taken together, the findings suggest that underwater heritage in Svalbard\u2014and perhaps across the world\u2019s northern oceans\u2014may not simply be lying in situ, cleanly preserved and waiting to be discovered. They also raise new questions about the role that ocean currents and climate change may be playing in bringing warm water masses into the Arctic and subarctic. Researchers aren\u2019t sure whether the shipworms found in 2016 were a southern species that\u2019s moved north, or an all-new species that thrives in colder waters\u2014genetic sequencing is underway.<\/p>\n \u201cThere\u2019s an imminent need to explore more widely,\u201d says Berge. \u201cIf [wrecks] are already in the process of being eaten up, we may already have lost our chance to learn from them.\u201d<\/p>\n \u00d8deg\u00e5rd is now planning to collaborate with other researchers to get a better handle on the shipworm situation in the western Arctic. Matthew Ayre, a climate historian at the University of Calgary in Alberta, hopes to work with \u00d8deg\u00e5rd\u2014once the COVID-19 pandemic permits\u2014to locate wrecks near Greenland, and assess the shipworm threat there.<\/p>\n \u201cShipworms are around Svalbard at the moment,\u201d says Ayre, \u201cbut will they move elsewhere with warming water? This heritage is so remote that very little work has been done, so we really don\u2019t know.\u201d<\/p>\n Ayre\u2019s work hasn\u2019t typically focused on wrecks. He studies captains\u2019 logbooks, which provide the most comprehensive and consistent descriptions available of 19th-century Arctic sea ice and weather. The data is used to create a more complete picture of the historical Arctic climate, and improve future climate modeling. But after finding the Nova Zembla<\/em>, a Scottish whaling wreck, near Baffin Island, Nunavut, in 2018, he had his eyes opened anew to the importance of material artifacts.<\/p>\n \u201cThat has really diverted my work,\u201d he says. \u201cI look now not just at the climate stuff but also the whalers\u2019 legacies on Baffin Island, and it\u2019s really catalyzed conversations there about this history and the relationship between Inuit and whalers.\u201d<\/p>\n Last June\u2019s Helmer Hanssen <\/em>voyage also included Maxime Geoffroy, a researcher in marine ecology at Newfoundland and Labrador\u2019s Memorial University. He and \u00d8deg\u00e5rd intend to go fishing for shipworms in Geoffroy\u2019s own backyard, off the coast of Labrador. The plan is to obtain logs of the same tree species used to build whaling ships, weigh them down with chains, and sink them 50 meters. After a year, they\u2019ll be hauled up and examined.<\/p>\n Geoffroy explains that while the conditions off Labrador may be very different from those off Svalbard, this kind of pan-Arctic effort may be needed to complete a truer picture of the threat shipworms pose in colder waters.<\/p>\n For \u00d8deg\u00e5rd, finding these material remains before it\u2019s too late is critical to bringing to life a story more resonant today than ever.<\/p>\n \u201cEuropean whaling was one of the first human-induced ecological catastrophes,\u201d he says. \u201cThe massive scale of harvesting, with so little contemplation of the effects, is a very important story to tell, and it\u2019s much easier to make the history relevant to people when you can almost go down to the level of individual lives, look at specific questions, and put as much flesh on those bones as possible.\u201d<\/p>\n But only, of course, if those bones are still there.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" When \u00d8yvind \u00d8deg\u00e5rd set out last June to scour the seafloor near Svalbard\u2014a vast, ice-covered Norwegian archipelago halfway between continental Norway and the North Pole\u2014he had a dream. A marine archaeologist at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology, \u00d8deg\u00e5rd <\/p>\n