Underwater museum
Long an important trading center and crossroads of human civilization, the Black Sea has seen the rise and fall of nations over thousands of years. Although its vast waters may have daunted ancient explorers, the Black Sea is, in fact, only barely a sea. Bordered by modern-day Bulgaria and Romania to the west, Turkey to the south and Ukraine to the north, it is nearly landlocked, connected to the Mediterranean Sea only through the narrow, dangerous Bosporus and Dardanelles straits.




According to Greek mythology, on the eastern shores of the Black Sea, there was once a kingdom called Kolchis. Located in what is today the Republic of Georgia, this kingdom was said to be the home of the Golden Fleece, the legendary treasure that Jason and his Argonauts set out to find and bring back to Greece.

The Argonauts’ quest across the previously unexplored Black Sea to bring back treasure is an allegory of the Greeks’ own exploration, and eventual colonization, of the region, says Robert Ballard, an archaeological oceanographer at the University of Rhode Island (URI). Searching not only for gold, but also for fish, the Greeks “went in both friendly and as a raiding party,” he says. “They made it into a wonderful journey.”

For more than two decades, Ballard has been on his own epic quest to merge oceanographic tools and techniques with archaeological methods, in an effort to uncover long-buried historical treasures — such as the R.M.S. Titanic, which Ballard discovered in 1985, hidden under 3,800 meters of water in the North Atlantic Ocean.


see: GEOTIMES

Thank you Roswitha