Underwater on Bermuda’s Montana Shipwreck – 180 | National Geographic

I'm Dr. Fleet Max Rouge. I work for the Bermuda government overseeing the shipwrecks that surround this island. Every one of them has an incredible story to tell. Now, I've been the custodian of historic wrecks for the islands of Bermuda for about just over a decade now. There are over 300 shipwrecks around this island, which is actually quite incredible because it's not that big a place. This means that pretty much anywhere you swim, you're gonna bump into a shipwreck. They form an integral part of our national identity.

It's one of Bermuda's most iconic shipwrecks. There's actually two shipwrecks laid on top of each other: you have the Constellation that came afterwards and the Montana. The debris from the Constellation is washed right through the center of this shipwreck, so you have a very confounding set of artifacts. You have some from the 20th century and some from the 19th century—everything's rolled into one. It's a really historically relevant shipwreck; it was part of the fleet of these blockade runners that ran very quickly to feed the Confederate South with weapons during the Civil War.

This was an iron ship; she had large paddle wheels on either side and big engines in the center. A lot of that is still completely intact. You can still go into parts of the shipwrecks and have a look around, but the bow is just completely occluded by hard coral. The stern is nestled down between reefs that have clearly grown up around it. Because it's pretty shallow and rocky, you can imagine those hard corals would have settled on it pretty quickly. This is how nature wants to be on this shipwreck. You know, there's been no interference.

That's actually one of the things we're trying to accomplish. In monitoring these shipwrecks, we can actually measure to some extent how fast coral grows. With a changing environment and our concerns about climate change, how coral responds and how coral grows is a pretty important thing. These shipwrecks are also a really great opportunity for us to establish a start point and decide from there how long it has taken for nature to take over these unfortunate human events.

Actually, art is simply absorbed by nature and turned into another one of its beautiful phenomena. These shipwrecks are sort of part of a historical narrative that tells us, but they also have important scientific functions. They operate as a kind of benchmark, if you want, in the environment for how things have changed up until now and how they're going to change going forward. Because they hold our interest, they're also a really important segue to getting people to care about the marine environment.