(ORDO NEWS) — A ship wrecked hundreds of years ago has been found at the bottom of Mjøsa, Norway’s largest lake. It is in almost perfect condition.
The vessel, with its unique stems, reveals the navigable history of the lake. The ship may have sunk between the 1300s and 1800s.
Researchers discovered the wreck during the Mission Mjøsa project, which aims to map the bottom of a 363 square kilometer lake using high-resolution sonar technology.
The lake is the source of drinking water for approximately 100,000 people in Norway.
“I expected that during the mapping of the dropped munitions, shipwrecks could also be found – and it turned out to be so,” said Øyvind Odegard, senior researcher in marine archeology at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology and principal investigator of the mission.
The recently discovered shipwreck lies at a depth of about 411 meters.
The ship was found using sonar, a system that uses sound pulses to detect and measure the area under water. The pictures showed that the length of the ship is 10 meters.
The freshwater environment and lack of waves at that depth kept the ship in perfect condition, apart from the corrosion of a few iron nails at the ends of the ship.
For Ödegard, the wear and tear of the metal is a clear indication that the wreckage has been resting at the bottom of the lake for quite some time, since it takes hundreds of years for corrosion to occur.
In the end, the ship may crumble when all the nails are gone.
In the stern of the vessel, there are indications of a central rudder, a steering element that appeared no earlier than the end of the 13th century.
The ship appears to have been built using a Scandinavian technique in which hull planks are stacked on top of each other.
This method was used during the Viking Age as a way to make a ship lighter and stronger and is known as clinker building.
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