Explorers accidentally find a graveyard of more than 40 ancient

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In the depths of the Black Sea lies a landscape of complete darkness, where there is no light and no oxygen.
Archaeologists have long believed this 'dead zone' holds of a perfectly preserved graveyard of shipwrecks.
Now, a mapping expedition has proved them right, after accidentally uncovering more than 40 ancient shipwrecks from the Ottoman and Byzantine periods.

Many of the colonial and commercial activities of ancient Greece and Rome, and of the Byzantine Empire, centred on the Black Sea.

After 1453, when the Ottoman Turks occupied Constantinople (and changed its name to Istanbul), the Black Sea was virtually closed to foreign commerce.
Nearly 400 years later, in 1856, the Treaty of Paris re-opened the sea to the commerce of all nations.