When a violent winter storm pummeled a small Scottish island in February 2024, it unearthed buried treasure ‒ a strange wooden beam found near the ocean’s edge.
It belonged to an 18th Century London whaling ship called the Earl of Chatham that crashed during an expedition to the Artic in 1788 and had served the British Royal Navy during the American Revolution.
If it weren’t for climate change, the wreckage might never have been recovered.
Those who worked for more than a year to identify the Earl of Chatham credited an uptick in stormy weather and new, unusual wind patterns for its discovery. The accelerating transformation of the coastline, known as the “cradle of shipwrecks,” could lead to similar finds in the future, they say.
Such discoveries are happening in many other places, too.
