The discovery also answers lingering questions about the AE1’s fate historians had long wondered whether it was sunk by the enemy or suffered an accident such as striking a reef.
Though no one alive today personally knew the lost crew members, the Australian government is attempting to contact their descendants in order to give families a sense of closure. Earlier efforts had been hampered by the undersea terrain, including uneven depths and large boulders that interrupted scans. The Hugin 1000, a robotic submarine which can operate autonomously or by remote control, comes equipped with a variety of instruments that allowed it to identify and, eventually, photograph the wreckage. But it took technology as cutting-edge as the AE1 itself had been in 1914 to put an end to the mystery. Even Jacques Cousteau tried his hand at finding the AE1. Various parties have seriously attempted searches for the first Allied submarine casualty of the war since as early as the 1970s. The 800-ton vessel vanished in 1914, at the outbreak of World War I, and while it and its 35-member crew were assumed lost shortly thereafter, no one knew what became of the AE1 until an unmanned vehicle discovered its final resting place 103 years later. While no one has yet found the ruins of (the almost certainly fictional) Atlantis, modern scanning, mapping and robotics technology has allowed for a growing tide of discoveries of ancient and modern shipwrecks.Ī recent example is the discovery of the wreck of the HMAS-AE1, Australia’s first submarine. Along the way countless ships and – according to legend – at least one island have been lost, never to be seen again. Norwegian explorer and writer Thor Heyerdahl demonstrated, in his 20th century Kon-Tiki and Ra expeditions, that even the earliest people could, and probably did, take to the sea. People have explored and attempted to cross the oceans since the dawn of humanity. Photo courtesy the Australian War Memorial.įrom almost the beginning of human history, humans have been fascinated with the water covering more than two-thirds of the globe – and what might lie beneath its surface. The HMAS-AE1 in Portsmouth, England, 1914.
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