Climate change impacts on shipwreck integrity and environmental risks Grant uri icon

abstract

  • Shipwrecks act as artificial reefs, biodiversity hotspots, and economic resources through tourism and fisheries. Climate change will have a variety of complex and interwoven effects on shipwrecks and thus predictive models and management strategies to protect these natural and cultural resources are needed. The preservation of these artificial reefs is not only beneficial to the biological community, but their deterioration could be a looming threat from the potential release of contaminants such as metals and paints from wreck surfaces and release of wreck contents that were otherwise contained. The impacts of changing temperatures and salinity from increased rainfall, storm frequency and intensities, and sea level rise on the long-term integrity of these wrecks is largely unknown. As microbial communities can use these contaminants as energy sources to enrich their growth, they may represent biological indicators of the release of contaminants in the nearby wreck environment. Here, we propose to collect a variety of archeological, biological, and geochemical data to provide insights into what changing environmental factors impact wreck integrity and develop a methodology that can applied to other wrecks on how to detect indicators of contaminants or environmental risks that may have happened or could in the future.

date/time interval

  • February 2023 - July 2025