Is a Russian nuclear sub
on a secret spy mission when a deadly fire breaks out?
This kind of sabotage would bring
the Western world to its knees.
Can cutting-edge forensic technology
reveal the identity of human remains
buried in an eerie Scandinavian lake?
There are so many of them,
it obviously could not be a single murder.
And what can explain a bizarre toxic haze hitting England's beaches?
A day of fun at the beach turns into a nightmare.
The underwater realm is another dimension.
It's a physically hostile place
where dreams of promise can sink into darkness.
I'm Jeremy Wade, and I'm searching the world
to bring you the most iconic and baffling underwater mysteries known to science.
The vast majority of our ocean is unobserved,
unmapped, and unexplored.
It's a dangerous frontier
that swallows evidence...
You have nowhere to run.
where unknown is normal
and understanding is rare.
We think of the internet as something
that exists "in the cloud" but, incredibly,
99.5% of it is located at the bottom of the ocean.
Email, banking data, and top-secret intel,
all transported by a vast network of underwater cables.
So, when a mysterious Russian spy submarine
catches fire in the Arctic Ocean,
tragically killing most of her crew,
it brings to light how vulnerable
these cables might be to sabotage.
Do subs like this have the capability to cripple the Western world?
And if so, will we be ready and able to stop them?
July 1st, 2019.
A Russian nuclear-powered submarine
emerges discreetly in the Port of Severomorsk, on the Kola Peninsula.
The vessel is in a state of emergency.
The submarine is badly damaged after catching fire in the Barents Sea.
There are reports that up to 14 people have died.
This is Russia's deadliest submarine accident in over a decade.
This sub is Russia's most secret naval asset,
and any information about it is classified.
Russian authorities are very reluctant
to talk about their military operations.
Moscow's silence raises suspicion all over the world.
The question everyone wants to know,
what was this nuclear sub up to when the accident happened?
Details are scarce.
The Russian Minister of Defense
doesn't name the submarine and actually says that it's a state secret.
The response prompts accusations of a cover-up
and a lack of transparency that draws parallels with past nuclear disasters.
In the 1980s, with the Chernobyl incident,
the Russian government stayed silent for over three days.
And it echoes another well-known tragic nuclear sub accident,
the Kursk.
Where 118 Russian submariners died,
the Russian government stayed silent for over two days.
In 2019, will this tragedy also be shrouded in mystery?
A day after the incident, the Minister of Defense
does let slip one piece of intriguing information.
The Russian Minister said the submarine was mapping the seafloor.
Ocean mapping is a classic cover
for top-secret underwater missions.
Is that the case here?
The identities of the 14 deceased submariners
are released to the public
and it's a bombshell revelation.
These weren't your usual Russian submarine personnel.
These were the elite of the Russian Submarine Service.
So much so, they have their own name.
They're called "the Hydronauts."
They were very high-ranking.
This indicates that there was a special mission
that required their presence on board.
You can rebuild a submarine far easier
than you can build experienced crew.
So, losing the crew, that's a loss of a tremendous asset.
The presence of the Hydronauts
could throw doubt on the claim
that the sub was only mapping the seafloor.
Was this mission more ominous?
A Russian news channel
identifies the mysterious submarine as the AS-31, Losharik.
The Losharik is a top-secret submersible.
It belongs to intelligence, research, and development organization.
Its last known location
was only 60 nautical miles east of Norway.
What was it doing so suspiciously close to a foreign coastline?
At the time of the accident,
there was actually a NATO exercise taking place in the Norwegian sea.
Submarines from France, Germany, Norway,
the UK, and the United States are all there on this training mission.
They have one country in mind.
Russia.
Is it merely a coincidence that this ship enters these waters
during such an important NATO training exercise?
Was the Losharik spying on these maneuvers?
Literally a goldmine of information
being put out there during these training exercises.
This isn't the first time
Russian military presence has been so close to Norwegian borders.
It seems that these waters are most important to Russia, but the question is why.
It's no secret that Russia
has big ambitions to dominate this Arctic region.
The Arctic has been of strategic interest
to Russia since the beginning of the Cold War,
where it kept its nuclear weapons arsenal.
Arctic region is enormous.
Russia has expanded its military along the whole Arctic coast.
Losharik is just one of a growing number of
nuclear-powered submarines and icebreakers in the region.
Russia has bases and operation area for the strategic submarines,
which are capable of launching intercontinental ballistic missiles
toward the United States and Canada.
But does the accident on board the doomed Losharik
expose another possible reason why Russia
needs a strong naval presence in the Arctic,
an area that's just beginning to reveal its untapped treasures?
In 2017, Putin suggested that the Arctic
contains over $35 trillion in untapped natural resources.
It's the proverbial goldmine.
And vessels like Losharik can now access these rich waters
through shipping routes made possible by the melting ice sheets.
But it means other countries also have their eyes on the Arctic.
This makes Russia very nervous.
So, the Losharik contributes to this in the way
that it strengthens the Russian presence in the region.
But the sub's secret experimental design
may hint at an even more threatening agenda,
one that could cripple the West.
As the ice cap melts in the Arctic Ocean,
countries all over the world are racing to get their hands
on the area's untapped wealth of natural resources.
Could the Losharik be part of Russia's secret plans
to control these extremely lucrative waters?
What the Losharik was doing in the Arctic
at the time of the fire is still a mystery,
but the sub's advanced capabilities
and unusual design may provide vital clues.
This particular submarine
is composed of a number of titanium spheres.
They're also very enclosed spaces,
so if something goes wrong in one of them,
then that could become the tomb of anybody who is in there.
Three days after the incident,
it's revealed that the fire started in the sub's battery compartment.
Although the vessel was nuclear-powered,
it does have batteries as secondary source of power.
And batteries under sea, they can let off gases.
So, the crew would've been trapped in small areas,
and it would've been full of fire and smoke,
and it would've contributed to their death.
So, in the wrong circumstances,
the Losharik could become a death trap.
Why was it designed in a way that could endanger its crew?
A series of spheres inside allows it to dive deeper
than a conventional submarine would.
The Losharik was designed to carry out
special operations at unusually extreme depths,
possibly up to 20,000 feet down.
This is ten times deeper than the operational depth of a US submarine.
The nuclear-powered sub
is equipped with another strange element.
It has retractable manipulator arms on the outside of its hull.
Why would the Losharik need these robotic arms?
The sub's advanced capabilities
give Western intelligence reason to be suspicious.
Losharik could be hiding a sinister agenda,
one that would bring mayhem across the globe.
Maybe the submarine was trying to do
something very clandestine and potentially illegal.
Today, nearly all of our daily communications
are carried through underwater cables,
nearly 750,000 miles of them, running along the seafloor.
On a daily basis,
what could be going through these fiber-optic cables?
Well, it could be financial transactions,
it could be any kind of secret communications.
It could be the Allied Nations communicating
with their military assets around the world.
Western intelligence speculates that with its unique design,
the Losharik's mission was to tamper with these deep-sea cables
and, possibly, even sabotage them.
This is 2015.
Various NATO officials were reporting
that Russian submarines were operating quite close to the seabed cables.
And, of course, the question was why.
Severing them, severing the flow of information
would strike very hard the economic and financial system,
and probably would wreak havoc on the Western societies.
So far, there is no hard evidence
that confirms Losharik's true mission.
But what's telling is that, even after the tragic fire
that killed 14 elite submariners,
it remains a crucial asset for Russia.
Losharik will be repaired and it will return to service
because it's so important for the research,
for the intelligence gathering, for the Russian Navy,
and the Russian Armed Forces in general.
This mysterious sub will take years to repair,
but its potential to wreak havoc
in the future remains very real.
Ancient underwater burial sites
have been discovered all over Northern Europe,
but few are as mysterious as the one found in a remote lake in Finland,
where the remains of around 100 people are uncovered.
Who these bones belong to and why they are here
have remained unanswered for over three centuries.
Now, with incredible advances in DNA technology,
these cryptic bones might finally start to reveal their secrets.
2018.
Scientists are examining human remains
discovered in a very strange, gruesome-looking lake
in western Finland, known as Levanluhta.
It's a real mystical but eerie site.
In the springtime, the lake's iron-rich,
blood-like water foams up through the ground.
Devoid of oxygen, it's perfect for preserving bones.
This stops the microorganisms from eating
the bodies of dead people buried inside of them.
The mystery begins in 1884,
when local men working in Levanluhta
are shocked to discover eight human skulls.
And it doesn't stop there.
More and more human bones are recovered.
The remains of approximately 100 people were found at this site.
It's a gruesome discovery.
Something extraordinary is going on at Levanluhta.
It takes nearly 150 years for scientists
to piece together clues from the human remains,
and start to unravel the riddle
of how so many bodies ended up in this chilling watery grave.
A mysterious and grisly lake in Finland
is giving up numerous human remains.
Archeologists suspect they could be the victims of a brutal sacrifice.
Will contemporary forensic analysis reveal the lake's dark secret?
When you find bones of dead people,
you wonder where they came from.
Are they, you know, ancient? Are they a murder victim?
When the mass of human remains is uncovered in 1884,
it's assumed they are war victims from the 16th century.
People believed that these bodies might be
from the Cudgel War, which was a peasant uprising.
The peasants were fighting against exploitation
by the nobility and the military.
The name "cudgel" comes from the type of weapons that the peasants used.
Blunt objects, such as the cudgel.
The war was known for its weapons,
but no weapons are found at Levanluhta.
And the investigation throws yet another perplexing conundrum
that scientists just can't solve.
Shockingly, they discovered that the bones are mostly women and children.
The presence of women and children
doesn't fit with the characteristics of a typical war grave.
At the turn of the 20th century,
an anthropologist throws even more doubt on the Cudgel War theory.
Analysis of the skeletal remains
reveals that the skulls are strangely narrower
and longer than those of Finnish people.
Anthropologists propose that the people are not from Finland at all,
but from mainland Europe,
where there are records of sacrificial rituals and burying the dead in water.
There are multiple examples of watery graves
and water burials in Northern Europe.
We often see watery burials as a sacrifice to the gods,
in which case criminals or bandits could be the ones who were buried there.
They're usually found strangled, uh, bound.
Uh, there's acts of violence, throats slit.
But the bones found in Levanluhta
are missing a crucial piece of evidence to support this theory.
These Finnish remains,
there appears to be no acts of violence.
The Levanluhta remains show no signs of trauma,
so this could be evidence that this wasn't a sacrifice.
It's not until 1993 that a breakthrough
in forensic science begins to untangle this mystery.
Through radiocarbon analysis, scientists can finally date the bones.
Turns out they date to the Iron Age.
The radiocarbon date suggests that these people
died somewhere between 500 and 700 A.D.
Now, with specific dates,
archeologists investigate what was going on
in Levanluhta around this time.
They turn to ancient Norse mythology,
and it provides a crucial clue
of a terrifying doomsday event.
Ancient Norse mythology
mentions three successive winters without any summer,
which they call the Fimbulwinter.
In the legend, snow comes in from all directions and ends all life on Earth.
A recent study in 2019 links the Fimbulwinter
to a series of real-life volcanic eruptions
in Central America in the 6th century.
A huge volcanic eruption, which brought darkness
and social collapse across the world.
This would've impacted agriculture.
It would've led to crop loss and famine all across the northern hemisphere.
Did crop failures cause the Levanluhta people to die of starvation?
In 2019, with new technology,
scientists finally analyze the bones to determine
if this freak climate disaster could be the cause of death.
Isotopic analysis is used to reconstruct ancient diets.
And the way that it's done is by looking at the carbon and the nitrogen values,
and by doing that, comparing it to different food sources.
Isotopic analysis reveals something unexpected.
These people exploited food from three sources,
sea, earth, and fresh water.
They had an incredibly varied diet,
and were actually really healthy when they died.
Their versatile diets would make them well equipped
to deal with any sort of crop failure due to a catastrophic event.
So, modern science rules out the possibility
that this extreme, long winter killed the lake victims.
After a nearly 150-year investigation,
are we any closer to knowing why so many bodies ended up in Levanluhta Lake?
Answers could be concealed in the ancient traditions of these mysterious people.
The ancient Levanluhta Lake bones
are so well preserved that they still hold vital clues
about who these people might be.
DNA technology may finally reveal the identity of the people
who were buried in this watery grave.
In 2019, after samples of the bones are DNA tested,
the scientists make a major breakthrough
in this nearly 150-year-old investigation.
DNA testing indicates that these are Sami people.
The Sami are indigenous to Finland,
but they inhabit areas much further north, nowhere close to the lake.
What were these Sami people doing so far south?
And how did they all end up in an underwater grave?
With the latest genetic revelations,
the puzzle pieces are coming together.
Finnish scientists now have a new theory
as to why these people were buried in a lake.
And the answer could be found deep in Sami mythology.
The Sami word "saiva" is used to refer
to a holy lake and the spirits living within it.
Saiva lakes take on magical and mystical properties,
and they represent the underworld for the Sami people.
Were these ancient Sami people buried in the lake,
which they believed to be a gateway to the afterlife?
This exciting new evidence in an investigation
that has lasted nearly a century and a half
is beginning to rewrite the story
of one of Europe's most extraordinary burial sites.
The mystery of why these Sami people were buried
in Levanluhta Lake is not yet solved.
However, as modern technology continues to transform archeology,
it may one day bring us closer to fully understanding our ancestors
and their connection to the underwater world.
A summer day at the beach turns ugly
when a strange haze hits England's southern coast
and hundreds of people end up in the hospital.
No one's sure what's causing it,
and it's followed by similar incidents.
Can authorities solve this toxic beach mystery
before even more people fall ill?
August 2017.
Birling Gap Beach on the southern coast of England.
Crowds are enjoying one of the hottest days of the year.
Then, like a scene from a horror movie,
the air turns into a yellowy haze
and begins to smell unbearably foul.
Is everybody all right?
Some say it's like the smell of burnt plastic, and corpses.
A nice day out in the sunshine
turns into a nightmare for these beachgoers.
Passersby are heaving and retching
after coming in contact with this toxic mist.
One person captures the bizarre moment on video.
Kyle, when did you first start to notice
things weren't quite right on the beach?
I noticed...
well, like I said, there was a yellowy-colored cloud
getting closer and closer to the coastline.
I noticed more and more people around us,
they were coughing and spluttering, eyes watering.
This is such an unusual incident.
It must be really scary not knowing what was happening.
Everyone was rushing to their cars,
there was traffic everywhere.
Coast guards and fire service, police, ambulance.
So strange to just...
Like, probably thousands of people
just emptying out on the road, and just...
There was definitely mass panic going on at the same time.
A major incident is declared.
The local hospital ends up carrying out
one of the biggest massive decontaminations in England's history.
About 200 people went to the hospital.
This frightening toxic haze is coming in from the sea.
But what's causing it is a mystery that no one can figure out.
The scene in Birling Gap reminds people
of a similar freakish incident four years earlier.
In 2013, citizens living in South England
complain of nausea and headaches, and a foul, rotten egg stench.
This time, authorities can pinpoint where it's coming from.
A gas leak from a power station in Normandy
that has traveled 200 miles to the UK shore.
If the wind is blowing the wrong way,
then all that pollution gets blown across to the UK.
Is another gas leak from France to be blamed
for causing a stink on Britain's shore again, four years later?
Scientists have tried reverse-modeling the winds
at those particular times to pinpoint the location of the source of these toxins.
The models show that on August 27th, 2017,
the surface air had come from an easterly direction
and, before that, had been parallel to the coast and coming from the west.
So, a gas leak in France is quickly ruled out as the cause.
There's no doubt, however, that the strange haze
is coming from somewhere out at sea.
Could the answer be found in a lethal marine phenomenon?
In different water bodies,
you will have what's called an algal bloom,
and this can happen as the seasons are warming up.
Algal blooms are known sometimes to produce
toxic chemicals that are not good for people.
Two days after the incident,
water samples are taken and tested for signs of an algal bloom.
The measurements that were done in this case
suggested there just wasn't enough algae in the water
to be producing anything that would harm human health on the beach.
So, what did cause this toxic mist?
If it's not coming from the water,
are there any other clues hiding in the air we breathe?
Authorities turn to local air monitoring stations,
and they reveal something disturbing.
When a toxic haze hits the southern coast of Britain,
what's causing it leaves scientists puzzled.
Could the answer lie in the foul smell coming from the toxic fog?
If people are reporting smelling rotten eggs,
my first idea is going to be there's sulfur dioxide out there.
One air monitoring station
reports an unusual increase in sulfur dioxide.
Meteorological evidence already suggests the source is off-shore.
So, the sulfur dioxide seems to be coming from the English Channel.
The sulfur dioxide could have come from ships in the English Channel.
The English Channel separates the UK and France,
and it's one of the world's busiest shipping lanes.
But how could this have produced toxic sulfur dioxide?
Many cargo ships contain hazardous and deadly chemicals.
So, sometimes, shipping containers might fall off a ship,
which cause hazardous chemicals
to enter the water and end up on nearby beaches.
Authorities investigate the ships
that were in the area at the time of the toxic haze.
There are no reports of sulfur dioxide-related accidents.
Baffled authorities draw a blank
and are no closer to solving the mystery
of the toxic haze in Birling Gap.
The case goes cold...
until two years later.
In 2019, only 25 miles away,
a scarily familiar state of emergency is declared on the coast.
Witnesses described people heaving and retching.
The beaches are evacuated.
Adding to the fear, the nightmare continues
along the same coastline in yet another frightening scene.
Only two weeks later, another 150 people fall ill on the coastline.
Could the toxic chemical have returned?
And authorities are very worried
the whole thing could happen again.
With three near-identical cases within the space of two years,
scientists desperately need to crack
the unknown source of the toxic haze.
Satellite data could hold the answer
that everybody desperately seeks.
In 2017, a satellite image captures
a strange plume coming from the English Channel.
One theory is that these toxic gases might come
from some release of toxic substances from shipwrecks.
They do often change, move, adjust,
and you do get leakage of potentially polluting substances.
The English Channel is littered with shipwrecks
sunk during the First and Second World Wars.
These underwater ticking-time bombs
could be an explanation for the hazardous chemicals that arrive on the beach.
The satellite image seems to show the plume
coming from almost exactly the same location
as a shipwreck sunk by a German mine in 1917.
It's known that there was a shipwreck from World War I, the SS Mira,
that lays in that particular part of the seabed.
Investigators work out that if chemicals
from the wreck were transported in the water,
it's possible they could've reached Birling Gap
at the exact same time the incident was reported.
If the toxic plume was in the air, however,
because of the easterly wind direction,
the wreck is unlikely to have been the source.
Authorities now believe a shipwreck
leaking a toxic chemical is plausible,
but it hasn't yet been categorically confirmed as the toxic culprit.
A massive effort has been made to track down
the source of this bizarre and terrifying haze,
but there's still no definitive answer.
And whether this poisonous seaside air
will become more frequent and more dangerous remains a mystery.
When divers explore a 300-year-old wreck
in the icy depths of the Baltic Sea,
they uncover a vast amount of cargo,
including an unexpected find.
Fragments of a Bible.
Researchers are perplexed by how these paper pages
could've survived underwater for three centuries.
In their quest for answers, they revealed a ship
with a saintly name but a sinful past.
2002.
A team of Russian divers is exploring a shipwreck
hiding in the cold, dark waters of the Baltic Sea.
They believe it could be the wreck
of an 18th-century vessel that was entangled in a corruption scandal
at the time of Peter the Great.
It's reputed to be hiding secret and illegal cargo.
Piecing together information from historical records
and exploration of the wreck,
the divers hope to find clues that will confirm
that this is the infamous ship they've been looking for.
They focus their attention first on some pieces of wood.
They find bits of timber, which they can then radiocarbon date.
Radiocarbon dating
came within dates about 1650 to 1680,
so it had to be made after that.
More intriguing is a broken ceramic dish.
It features an image of the biblical Archangel Raphael,
engraved with the date 1696.
These two pieces of dating evidence
indicate this is the wreck of the Archangel Raphael.
The archeologists realize they've found a very special shipwreck.
The divers have conclusive proof
they found a notorious shipwreck
with a 300-year-old unsolved mystery.
Historical sources suggest the Archangel Raphael
could've been laden with smuggled cargo when it sank.
After three centuries under water,
is there a trove of contraband still hiding inside the wreck?
Researchers begin their investigation
in Russian State Navy archives,
hoping to reconstruct the ship's final voyage.
October 1724,
the merchant ship departs St. Petersburg.
Its intended destination, the German port city of Lubeck.
It's normal for the trade
between the German and Russian ports,
from St. Petersburg to Lubeck,
there is a row of trading towns,
really, entrepots along the coast.
It was a vibrant trading economy,
and the Archangel Raphael was a key part of this.
The location of the wreck, however,
is mysteriously far away from its intended route.
Well, the ship was originally headed to Lubeck,
which is nowhere close to where it was found.
So, what the heck was it doing there?
Luckily for the investigators,
details of the ship's sinking are well documented,
and they are yielding some critical clues.
The historical archives suggest that this ship
was lost by getting stuck in ice and, as the ice moves,
the ship is basically crushed and dragged.
The crew all survive and are able
to successfully get away from the ship before it sinks.
The records describe how local inhabitants
try to salvage cargo through an ice-hole
a few months after the ship goes down.
They recover over 350 bales of leather,
and say there's more cargo out of reach inside the wreck.
In their quest to discover
if these could be smuggled goods,
the investigators turn to original customs documents.
And they expose something highly suspicious.
When the Archangel Raphael
departs St. Petersburg in October of 1724,
according to customs records, it's nearly empty.
This contradicts what the local divers saw.
There might have been some smuggling going on.
The ship was clearly up to no good.
Not only does this strongly suggest
the ship was carrying illegal goods when it sank,
it also helps researchers understand why the wreck
is far from its intended destination.
It's thought Archangel Raphael stops on the way to Lubeck
in a place called Krasnaya Gorka,
where it could possibly have taken on the contraband.
This place is well known for its smuggling activities,
and, suspiciously, the Archangel Raphael
stays there for a biblical 40 days.
The long stopover results in the ship getting trapped in the ice
and abandoned by its crew, after which it sinks.
Everything on board the Archangel Raphael,
from personal items to cargo, is left just as it is.
And the ship lies forgotten
in the Baltic waters for three centuries.
Until 2014.
Have these precious artifacts survived?
And what dark secrets can they reveal about the Archangel Raphael?
Russian underwater archeologists
hope to discover what treasures are hiding inside
the 18th-century shipwreck, Archangel Raphael,
and whether they've survived 300 years under water.
After investigating historical records,
maritime archeologists now need to go underwater
to find out more about this infamous merchant ship.
The investigators plan to excavate the ship.
2014, excavations begin.
Divers look for any clues that might help uncover the truth
about what the ship is carrying when it sinks.
Is it possible the cargo could have survived for three centuries?
The beauty of the Baltic Sea
when it comes to preserving a shipwreck, is the water is brackish.
All the little critters that would normally eat
and degrade organic materials just aren't present.
As divers explore inside the shipwreck, they find something unusual.
They're shocked to find artifacts covered completely in tar.
Tar was often transported inside of wooden barrels in this period.
Now, remember that the ship is locked in ice
and is being gradually, slowly, over a period of time,
crushed and crushed, and, eventually,
the tar starts to leak out and it goes all over the various artifacts.
It's a setback for the archeologists
who were hoping to find the artifacts still intact.
Then, the mystery of the ship's cargo
takes a new twist with the discovery of a book of psalms.
The book, strangely, is unlike the other artifacts.
They find one of the most precious items of cargo
is not covered in tar.
And why is this?
Scientists restoring these pages in their labs
are surprised to find them perfectly intact and legible.
It's very rare to find paper preserved on these sorts of sites.
Instead of tar, this book has been hiding away in silt.
Silt, or mud, is very good at preserving artifacts
because it creates sort of anoxic environment
and reduces the amount of oxygen,
which is what organisms need in order to decompose.
Why it's only this holy book
that avoided being covered in tar is a mystery.
Being named Archangel Raphael,
is there some kind of magical or spiritual activity going on?
Unable to see the complete load of cargo still hiding inside,
the dive team employs photogrammetry to fully survey the wreck.
Photogrammetry is a series of photographs or images that,
when we merge them together, we can create
a three-dimensional image of the object.
The incredibly accurate 3D model of the ship
and seven years of painstaking excavation
begin to yield stunning discoveries,
including items of clothing that just shouldn't have survived for so long.
What makes the Archangel Raphael
so special is the preservation of organic material on this incredible site.
And after years of researching the state archives,
they finally find physical evidence
of smuggled goods on board the ship.
Animal horns and barrels of grain, fish, and even bacon.
And the amount of cargo is way in excess
of what's recorded on the 1724 customs list.
What's shocking about the number of artifacts found inside
is that there are far more than they should be
based on its last port of call, which was in St. Petersburg.
The ship was in illegal possession of goods.
The 18th century was known as the golden age of smuggling,
and the staggering amount of artifacts retrieved
three centuries later reveals the true scale
of the ship's lucrative cloak-and-dagger operation.
After years of investigating the wreck,
four hundred items are recovered in total,
including things which are impossible to imagine in their worth
and things we had never believed
would be recovered from such a wreck.
Researchers believe there could be
even more secrets hiding in the Archangel Raphael.
Wrecks and historical treasure like these lead us to wonder
what other time capsules the sea has preserved,
still waiting to be discovered.