January 2023 Updates

I must confess: I was wrong. In last month’s update blog post I said that “These days, since I seemed to have mined most of what is available online there aren’t many changes.” Well, this month I stumbled across an entirely new source of data.

I am referring to the UK Hydrographic Office’s Admiralty Maritime Data Solutions. There they offer a shapefile of 94,000 wrecks from around the world for hundreds of years. Filtering out only those ships that were sunk between 1939 and 1945 leaves about 4,000 records. Though the wrecks can be found all around the world, the majority of the shipwrecks in the database for the time period that I am looking at are around the UK (see map), not surprisingly. I am happy to report that it appears that I have 97% of the shipwrecks on their list.

The UK Hydrographic data isn’t perfect. There are duplicate records, records putting ships well inland and a number that are listed as NameProbably? But it’s another data source and it has inspired me to dig deeper on some of the wrecks.

As a result, this month’s update is considerable:

• 54 additions (not all because of the UK Hydrographic list)
• 4 deletions (all duplicates)
• 387 records were moved to more accurate locations
• 5 other edits

I expect the next month or two to be similar as I wade through the remaining 2/3 of the data.

See the new additions and changes on the map!