After a decade of painstaking underwater searching, the wreck of a Soviet World War II submarine has been found in the Baltic Sea. The vessel went down with its fifty-man crew in 1940 after being sunk by a mine laid by Finland. The relatives of those who died say it is a matter of honor to establish what really happened all those years ago.

DIVER, May 2010  Live ammo, Enigma machines, space-station controllers - you may not have considered the possibilities of diving clear Baltic waters, but there's more to Latvia than stag weekends, says Dmitri Gorski. Photos by Alex Dawson.

Swedish divers are exploring the Baltic seabed in an attempt to shed light on centuries-old secrets buried in the deep. The project is aimed at restoring maritime history.

The Baltic Sea has always been a busy route for ships, but some have met misfortune over the ages leaving plenty of work for maritime archeologists. The Swedish underwater explorers, however, are looking for something in particular.

One of Sweden's greatest warships, Drygden was a ship-of-the-line which took part in the successful war with Russia in 1788-90. She perished after a huge explosion ripper her apart and has since been forgotten on the seabed.

Thanks Sweden's Maritime Museum curator Hans Lineskär she has now been rediscovered. For the first glimpses of the once stately vessel in over 200 years has now been captured.

V.Mäss  In May 1990 a wreck of an unknown ship was discovered in the course of the dredging of the left bank of the Pärnu River by a newly built pier of the yacht club. The wreck lay embedded under a 30-40 cm layer of mud at the depth of 1.5 m of water. Before dredging was stopped temporarily, a certain amount of fragments of the ship's planks and ribs were taken ashore by an excavator.

National Board of Antiquities

 The National Board of Antiquities preserves Finland's material cultural heritage: collects, studies and distributes knowledge of it. The Board is a cultural and research institution, but it is also a government authority charged with the protection of archaeological sites, built heritage, cultural-historically valuable environments and cultural property, in collaboration with other officials and museums.

The Schleswig Holstein sailed into a harbour near Gdansk on an apparent courtesy visit, only then to fire on the Polish garrison. These, as it turned out, were the opening shots of WW2. Marcin Trzcinski dives an historic battleship wreck

0447: Open fire!

Russalka was built during the "Age of  Iron" in Russia. It was constructed at the navy yard in St. Petersberg in 1864. It took two years to build this magnificent turret ship.  She came out to be 204 feet long and 42 feet wide. Even though the ship had heavy armenants includihng 2 armored- revolving turrets and two .22 9 inch cailber guns, its decks were only two feet above the water, so there wasn't a lot of room for error in this heavily armored ship.Ironclads were not designed to battle far from shore, and the Russalka was no acception. it only suffered damage from one collison during its entire time out to sea until its final voyage.

At 225m long and registered at 70,000 tonnes, the Fu Shan Hai contains enough steel to build 10 Eiffel Towers and covers an area bigger than a football field. It's summer on the Danish island of Bornholm and 24 technical divers gather to explore this new 69m-deep wreck. Lars Kirkegaard is one of them.

MY STOMACH FLUTTERS

The Our World-Underwater Scholarship Society every year is granting scientific diving internship as part of the Academy of Underwater Sciences (AAUS). This internship provides undergraduate students with the experience and opportunities necessary for a future in science, diving for research, or scientific diving-related fields. Intern applicants can be students from colleges and universities with an interest in science and diving.