The wreck of a steamship that sent an iceberg warning to the Titanic shortly before the ill-fated ocean liner met its fate was finally located on the bottom of the Irish Sea.
The merchant ship in question, the SS Mesaba, was sailing across the Atlantic in 1912 when it sent a warning radio message to the RMS Titanic, but while the latter ship did receive it, the message never reached the bridge, and the rest is history.
The SS Mesaba was torpedoed in 1918 by a German submarine while in convoy, and its wreck remained unaccounted for until researchers from Bangor University managed to finally identify it using a multi-beam sonar.
According to a press release by the university, Mesaba’s remains were but one of the 273 shipwrecks located on the 7,500 square miles of the seabed beneath the surface of the Irish Sea, that were “scanned and cross-referenced against the UK Hydrographic Office’s database of wrecks and other sources.”
The details of the wrecks have been published in the “Echoes from the Deep”, a new book penned by Dr. Innes McCartney of Bangor University who said that the results of the work described in the book “has validated the multidisciplinary technique employed and it is a ‘game-changer’ for marine archaeology.”