A delicate operation to expose two unique medieval ships and a sunken island in the Venetian lagoon has begun.
The boats were filled with mud and sunk in 1328 in a desperate attempt to protect the shores of San Marco from the rising sea. The attempt failed and the island was abandoned soon after. But in 1996, the boats were rediscovered, almost perfectly preserved in one metre of water.
In July, a team of Italian archaeologists started constructing a waterproof wooden screen around the 8000 square metre site, and on Wednesday, they started to pump water out.
“The boats are unique,” Francesca de Pol of the Venice Water Authority told New ¾«¶«´«Ã½. “We do not know how the medieval Venetian galleys were built – and this is the only one that has been found.”
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But a lack of money means the team from the state-funded New Venice Consortium will have just a few weeks to study the wrecks before removing the protective screen and allowing the water back in.
“At the moment, it is too expensive to completely remove and restore the boats,” says de Pol. “Perhaps it will be possible in the future.”
Mud pack
The galley is about 38 metres long and five metres wide and was used for war and trade. It carried light cargoes, so wrecks were easily broken up in the deep sea.
The other, flat-bottomed vessel, is 24 metres long. Marco d’Agostino, the archaeologist leading the operation, thinks it was probably used for commerce.
The San Marco vessels are well preserved because they were packed with heavy mud prior to sinking in shallow water, he says.
Documents from the 14th century record requests by monks living on the island for boats that they could sink to bolster their shore defences. “These boats were at the end of their normal use but they were in perfect condition. They were filled with sediment and sunk,” says de Pol.
The water pumping should be finished by Friday, when the process of cleaning up the boats is scheduled to begin. Full surveys will start at the beginning of September and will last for about a fortnight. Then the site will be covered by sand, the screen removed and the waters will flood back in again.
![Astronomers have long known that understanding how star clusters come to be is key to unlocking other secrets of galactic evolution. Stars form in clusters, created when clouds of gas collapse under gravity. As more and more stars are born in a collapsing cloud, strong stellar winds, harsh ultraviolet radiation and the supernova explosions of massive stars eventually disperse the cloud, and their light can bear down on other star-forming regions in the galaxy. This process is called stellar feedback, and it means that most of the gas in a galaxy never gets used for star formation. Researching how star clusters develop can answer questions about star formation at a galactic scale. Now, the state of the art has been further developed with both Hubble and Webb working together to provide a broad-spectrum view of thousands of young star clusters. An international team of astronomers has pored over images of four nearby galaxies from the FEAST observing programme (#1783), trying to solve this mystery. Their results show that it is the most massive star clusters that clear away their gaseous shroud the fastest, and begin lighting their galaxy the earliest. The team identified nearly 9000 star clusters in the four galaxies in different evolutionary stages: young clusters just starting to emerge from their natal clouds of gas, clusters that had partially dispersed the gas (both from Webb images), and fully unobstructed clusters visible in optical light (found in Hubble images). With Webb???s ability to peer inside the gas clouds, they were able to then estimate the mass and age of each cluster from its light spectrum. This image shows a section of one of the spiral arms of Messier 51 (M51), one of the four galaxies studied in this work, as seen by Webb???s Near-Infrared Camera (NIRCam). The thick clumps of star-forming gas are shown here in red and orange, representing infrared light emitted by ionised gas, dust grains, and complex molecules such as polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs). Within these gas complexes, each tens or hundreds of light years across, Webb reveals the dense, extremely bright clusters of massive stars that have just recently formed. The countless stars strewn across the arm of the galaxy, many of which would be invisible to our eyes behind layers of dust, are also laid bare in infrared light. [Image description: A large, long portion of one of the spiral arms in galaxy M51. Red-orange, clumpy filaments of gas and dust that stretch in a chain from left to right comprise the arm. Shining cyan bubbles light up parts of the gas clouds from within, and gaps expose bright star clusters in these bubbles as glowing white dots. The whole image is dotted with small stars. A faint blue glow around the arm colours the otherwise dark background.]](https://images.newscientist.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/13114322/SEI_296271016.jpg)
