
Kingposts of the SS Richard Montgomery in the Thames Estuary.
The good news is that last month there was a debate in the UK’s House of Lords about what to do with the wreck of the Liberty ship SS Richard Montgomery, which sank loaded with munitions in the Thames estuary near Sheerness in World War II. The bad news is that similar debates have been taking place for most of the past 75 years since the ship sank with no clear answer as to what to do with the dangerous wreck.
SS Richard Montgomery sank in a gale in 1944. The wreck which still contains an estimated 1,400 tonnes of high explosives, has been referred to by the BBC as the “ticking time bomb of the Thames.” The New Scientist has referred to the ship as “The Doomsday Wreck.”
The
In the general category of you can’t make this stuff up, in early hours of Friday morning, a mass brawl broke out on the P&O Britannia, in which passengers used furniture and plates as weapons, according to witnesses. Six people—three men and three women—were treated for bruises and cuts sustained in the melee. The ship was returning from a week-long cruise to Norway’s fjords. The brawl reportedly followed an alcohol-fuelled afternoon of “patriotic” partying on the ship’s deck.
The
Here is a visually stunning twelve-minute animation, Age of Sail by Google Spotlight Stories. The story itself is a bit anemic, but the visuals largely make up for it. The producers describe the video as follows:
A 15-year-old girl was allegedly plied with liquor aboard a Royal Caribbean ship by a group of men, before being taken to a cabin and gang-raped. She was on a seven-day cruise with her two sisters and grandparents beginning the day after Christmas in 2015. She alleges that everything but the rape took place in full view of crew and security cameras, yet nobody intervened to prevent the men from buying alcohol for her or leading her away to the cabin.
For a number of years, we have followed the 
In January 1968, the French submarine
Earlier this year, technicians operating a robotic camera surveying a route for a natural gas pipeline in the Baltic Sea, were surprised to find a 500-year-old shipwreck virtually intact on the seafloor. The ship was found at a depth of 141 meters. The lack of oxygen in the cold and brackish waters of the Baltic Sea help to slow the decay of the ship, which is sitting on the bottom with two masts still rising vertically, the beakhead and bowsprit still projecting from the prow. The remains of a yard rests diagonally on deck while nearby an unlaunched ship’s boat sits snug against the portside gunnel. A bilge pump, capstain, and an anchor, still catted to the bow, are also visible. The shape of the ship’s anchor help date the ship to the late 15th or early 16th century. 

On April 23rd, 1945, the patrol boat 