Shipwrecks Map: 20 Maps of WW2 Wrecks, Great Lakes and Treasure

Search MapIndex for shipwrecks and 578 maps come back, and their makers love a form. One fills in when it was built, why it was lost and how visible it is for 640 hulls seen from above; a Norwegian dive map gives 1,855 wrecks their years in brackets, down to two trams Bergen dumped in the sea; a sonar team off New York dates every pass over the seabed. Others keep count of what nobody knows: a German treasure map rates each hoard certain, probable or mythical, and a Japanese one skips the carrier Kaga because the theories about her sinking would take too long to write down.

1. Satellite Shipwrecks Map: 640 Wrecks You Can See From Above

   On 16 June 1942 a Japanese submarine chased the USS Coldbrook onto Middleton Island in the Gulf of Alaska, and her captain grounded her on purpose to save the crew; she is still “fully visible above water”. Every one of these 640 wrecks can be found in satellite imagery, from North America’s 199 to Asia’s 56, and most come with the same sheet: name, year built, ship type, cause of wreck, date, a visibility level and whether diving is permitted. Where the record runs out, the author says so. At Kelsey Bay in British Columbia one hulk is either HMCS Lasalle or HMCS Cape Breton, both sunk there as breakwaters, so each got a marker on the same wreck. The strangest is the Sub Marine Explorer, an experimental submersible of the 1860s left on Isla San Telmo in Panama’s Pearl Islands after its crew began to suffer decompression sickness.

   

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   640640 points

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   United StatesAustraliaCanadaand 105 more

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2. WW2 Shipwrecks Map: 1,416 Sunken Warships by Navy

   USS Tang and USS Tullibee were both “sunk by own torpedo” in 1944, one off Taiwan, the other north of Palau. Each of the 1,416 warships on this map gets a line like that, sorted by navy: 659 German and Italian, 249 American and Soviet, 232 Imperial Japanese, 112 British and Dutch, and smaller layers down to 9 Norwegian ships. Some outlived the war only to be sunk on purpose: the carrier Saratoga by an atomic bomb test on 25 July 1946, the Pearl Harbor veteran Nevada as a target on 31 July 1948. The ammunition ship Mount Hood gets a longer story: on 10 November 1944 a lieutenant and 13 men were walking on the beach at Manus when they saw a flash from the harbour and two quick explosions, and turned their boat back towards the ship.

   

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   1,4161,413 points, 1 line, 2 areas

   Countries

   JapanNorwayPhilippinesand 50 more

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   Google My Maps

3. Great Lakes Shipwrecks Map: 1,249 Wrecks and Dive Sites

   The tug J.K. Ward, sunk in the Rideau Canal in 1892, is listed as 49 feet long and 58 feet high, “likely a clerical error for a vessel of this type”. The 978 entries from ShotLine Diving read like ship registers with a diver’s honesty: the Peerless, a two-masted schooner built at Bronte in 1853 by Melancthon Simpson, or the Edmund Fitzgerald under her official number, US 277437. They reach beyond the five lakes, up the Ottawa River and onto Lake Temiskaming, where the small steamer Emerillon was abandoned at Snake Creek in 1898. Other layers add 100 St. Lawrence River sites, 77 Lake Ontario wrecks, 52 NOAA wrecks and 29 dives in Lake George, and at Tonawanda an iron ferry boiler lies barely submerged beside a graveyard of old lumber-dock barges.

   

   Objects

   1,2491,249 points

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   United StatesCanada

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   Google My Maps

4. Shipwreck Sonar Map: 451 Wrecks Off the US East Coast

   On 17 March 1877 the steamship Rusland ran aground directly on top of the Adonis, a sailing ship wrecked in a gale 18 years earlier, and today the two lie together under 20 feet of water off New Jersey. This map of 451 wrecks and obstructions is a survey log: 324 entries record the date the site was imaged by side-scan or multibeam sonar, most of them between 2019 and 2021. Wrecks without a name get a working one in quotes: a “150’ WOOD WRECK” where a steam whistle suggests something “more than ‘just’ a barge”, or “MYRONUS”, whose 190 feet are unlikely to be the real 118-foot schooner. The Achilles, an iron steamer lost in fog in 1887, was found from 1888 Life Saving Service records and dived in July 2020, and in one scan the shapes that move around a coal barge appear to be dolphins.

   

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   451451 points

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   United States

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   Google My Maps

5. Norway Wreck Diving Map: 1,855 Wrecks, Oslofjord to Finnmark

   When Bergen closed its tramway in 1965, a few of its trams were dumped in the sea, and two still stand upright and intact at 30 metres off Knektholmen on Askøy. This Norwegian dive map holds 1,855 wrecks, 680 of them in Vestlandet, each with its years in brackets and its depth. The Oslofjord ferry Oksvald [1927-1978] ended up as part of the foundation of the Vollen Cafe; the cruiser Blücher, torpedoed on 9 April 1940, lies at 90 metres and has been protected from diving as a war wreck since 2016. A week later a Ju 52 crashed near Ramvikholmen with Blücher’s captain on board, flying back from Berlin, where he had given his account of her loss. A jacket with glasses and a pilot’s licence was found floating; the wreck has never been found.

   

   Objects

   1,8551,854 points, 1 area

   Countries

   NorwaySvalbard and Jan MayenRussian Federationand 3 more

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   Google My Maps

6. Treasure Shipwreck Map: 80 Hoards Rated Real or Myth

   Every entry on this German map rates itself three times: does it exist, is the place known, what is it worth. HMS Lutine, lost off Terschelling in 1799, scores certain, certain and extremely valuable; the crates the Nazis sank in Austria’s Toplitzsee, full of forged British pound notes, count as mythical, one of 13 such entries. The layers run from Armada ships and Columbus’s ships to pirate hoards and Nazi loot. The Elector of Bavaria’s table silver went down in the Inn near Mühldorf in 1648, as the Swedes and the French closed in, and the sword Kusanagi, one of Japan’s imperial regalia, is placed in the Kanmon Strait, lost in 1185, existence “uncertain”.

   

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   8080 points

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   IrelandGermanyFranceand 26 more

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   Google My Maps

7. Spanish Armada Shipwrecks Map: Ireland, 1588

   The galleass Girona hit the rocks of Lacada Point on 28 October 1588 with 1,100 men aboard, her own crew and those of two ships she had rescued days before; seven to nine survived. This Spanish map follows the Armada’s wrecks along Ireland’s coast date by date, and what became of the men. Some 170 survivors of several ships were hanged on Cnoc na Crocaire by the sheriff of Clare; the crew of the Gran Grifón spent 50 days on Fair Isle before a pinnace “full of Spaniards” landed at Anstruther and was fed. A second layer collects what is left: a church bell at Carndonagh credited to La Trinidad Valencera, and a chestnut tree said to have grown from the chestnuts a Spanish sailor carried against scurvy, buried in an unmarked grave nearby.

   

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   6767 points

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   IrelandUnited KingdomFrance

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   Google My Maps

8. Edmund Fitzgerald Map: The Last Voyage, Hour by Hour

   “I have a fence rail down, have lost a couple of vents, and have a list,” the Edmund Fitzgerald radioed at 3:30 PM on 10 November 1975. This map places her and the freighter Arthur M. Anderson side by side, from the docks of Superior and Two Harbors on 9 November to 7:00 PM, when two huge waves put water on top of the Anderson 35 feet above the waterline, and 7:20, when she lost sight of the Fitzgerald. Around the track lie the places that remember her: the Shipwreck Museum at Whitefish Point, her lifeboats on the museum ship Valley Camp, her anchor in Detroit, and the Coast Guard’s Grumman Albatross #7236, sent out that night, now in a museum in Pensacola.

   

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   5552 points, 3 lines

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   United StatesCanada

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9. Concrete Ship Map: 806 Hulls, Barges and Caissons

   In 1929 two concrete boats were built in Osterfjorden, and one of them turned out so heavy it could not be got off the slipway. This research map collects 806 ships made of concrete, most of them barges: 232 British wartime FCB barges, 121 American-built vessels, 83 Phoenix caissons, German, French and Norwegian hulls. Many ended up as something else. The Silvestre stranded in 1925 in the Tjøme channel and still shows her propeller at low water; a barge in Lübeck sheltered refugees after the war and became a jazz club in the late 1970s; a sunken concrete vessel at Fethiye in Turkey, reported with “drøbak” still on her stern in 1935, served as an ore wharf. A hull at Stotts Pastures turned out not to be a ship at all but probably a mould for fibreglass boats, framed with old bread trays.

   

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   806806 points

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   United KingdomFranceUnited Statesand 40 more

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10. Black Sea Shipwrecks Map: 2,203 Wrecks in Russian

    The German landing barge AF-70 lies upside down off Blagoveshchenskaya, “like a huge metal box”, since four Soviet Il-2s attacked her convoy on 19 May 1943. This Russian map holds 2,203 wrecks, thickest in the Black Sea and the Sea of Azov, where German barges, Soviet armoured boats and landing craft listed by factory number sank in the landings around Kerch and Novorossiysk, with depths and the height of the wreck above the seabed. It carries on into the Cold War, to the destroyer Otvazhny, lost in 1974 when the motor of an anti-aircraft missile started by itself during an exercise, and out into the Atlantic, where the Hood went down with 3 survivors of 1,421 and the Bismarck was found in 1989.

    

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    2,2032,203 points

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    Russian FederationUkraineEstoniaand 37 more

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    Google My Maps

11. Ship Graveyard Map: Spakenburg's Sunken Fishing Boats

    Spakenburg’s botters were not allowed to be broken up in the harbour, only at the Zeekrib or by sinking them in the graveyard, and some went to the zoo at Wassenaar instead. Here lie the wooden fishing boats of a Dutch town whose fleet disappeared between 1880 and 1975, pinned by hull number from Pieter de Vos’s research since 2000 and a 2013 sonar survey. BU183 burned in 1945 during the liberation; after the storm and flood of 13 and 14 January 1916 about 45 botters were thrown ashore, some of them ending up here. A sketch of 1931 shows the “Schuitenkerkhof”, the boat cemetery, and the drone photos go on: one was taken on 7 November 2025.

    

    Objects

    11197 points, 12 lines, 2 areas

    Countries

    Netherlands

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12. Japanese Warship Wrecks Map: The Imperial Navy's Last Hours

    At 12:41 two bombs hit the Yamato aft; at 13:37 three torpedoes struck her port side; at 14:20 the list reached 20 degrees and all hands were called on deck, and at 14:23 she sank. This Japanese map of 67 warships tells each end like that. The carrier Shinano sank ten days after completion, the battleship Musashi lived 821 days after 1,591 days of building, and the carrier Junyo, moored in Sasebo under wires, mats and trees, is said never to have been attacked. The Kaga’s entry says only that there are several theories of her sinking, too long to write out, “I’ll add them later”.

    

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    6767 points

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    JapanRussian Federation

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13. Missouri River Steamboat Wrecks Map: 80 Lost Packets

    The Mollie Dozier snagged in 1866 behind Stoner Island, and the chute was named after her; the Spread Eagle sank in 1864 at Pinckney Bend, which became Spread Eagle Bend. These 80 steamboat wrecks on the Missouri, located by E.B. Trail and H.M. Chittenden, come with size, tonnage and the way they were lost: snagged, burned, sunk in ice or torn from the docks in the Great Ice Gorge at St. Louis in 1856. On 24 September 1854 all three boilers of the Timour 2 exploded at once while she took on wood near Jefferson City. The earliest is the Thomas Jefferson, which struck a snag in 1819 while accompanying the Western Engineer up the river.

    

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    8080 points

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    United States

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    Google My Maps

14. Pacific Shipwrecks Map: Truk, Bikini and 1,008 Wrecks

    Two Liberty ships named Ever Prosperity, registered in the same port, ran straight onto the barrier reef of New Caledonia, one in 1965 and the other in 1970, with the same captain in command both times. This map gathers 1,008 wrecks and aircraft across the Pacific, Australia, New Zealand and Asia. At Bikini the battleship Nagato, Yamamoto’s flagship, lies almost upside down at 40 metres after the A-bomb tests; in Truk Lagoon the San Francisco Maru sits upright at 63 metres with tanks on her deck. The author argues with the dive shops too: the “cement wreck” in Koror Harbor is often called the USS Lignite, “but I have reasons to believe it is not”.

    

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    1,0081,008 points

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    AustraliaMarshall IslandsNew Zealandand 39 more

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15. Chemical Weapons Shipwreck Map: Gas Ships Scuttled at Sea

    On 24 September 1946 the hulk Bantam was towed out to sea and scuttled 18 miles from Sydney Heads, in 1,200 fathoms, with 4,000 tons of poison gas shells and old ammunition; that December the Bingarra sank with her chemical cargo within four minutes. This map follows chemical weapons from factory to seabed: production sites, depots, loading ports, dumping areas and 91 positions where ships were reported scuttled, next to 66 where the wrecks were actually found. Off Egersund the torpedo boat T-190 lies at 310 metres; from Fort Belan in Wales landing craft carried Tabun bombs to Cairnryan to be loaded for dumping at sea.

    

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    236228 points, 8 areas

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    GermanyUnited KingdomAustraliaand 7 more

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    Google My Maps

16. Scotland Shipwreck Map: 157 Wrecks Reported by Locals

    A retired scallop diver, David Henderson, gave the team three wrecks he had come across in the 1990s, and the Reverend Donald MacQuarrie emailed the story of the James A Wright, a 19th-century sailing ship aground in the Outer Hebrides. SAMPHIRE went from harbour to harbour along Scotland’s Atlantic coast from 2013, asking dive charter skippers, harbour masters and fishermen what lies below, and blogged each stop. The result is 157 reported sites, each with a SAMPHIRE ID, from a previously unknown 17th- or 18th-century wreck at Drumbeg to shapes in multibeam data off Oban, among them a 20-metre wreck and the wing of a Catalina.

    

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    240239 points, 1 line

    Countries

    United KingdomSpain

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17. Franklin Expedition Map: Erebus and Terror, 1845 to 2016

    Whalers last saw HMS Erebus and HMS Terror in Lancaster Sound on 28 July 1845. This small map follows the 128 men year by year: wintering on Beechey Island, the cairn on King William Island where a message of 1847 reported all was well, and the note added in 1848 that 24 men had died, the ships were abandoned and the survivors were heading for the Back River. A line traces their route by the remains found along it, to the Adelaide Peninsula. The last two pins are the wrecks themselves, Erebus found in 2014 and Terror in 2016, in Terror Bay.

    

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    1713 points, 4 lines

    Countries

    CanadaGreenland

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    OpenStreetMap uMap

18. Shipbreaking Map: Where Ships Go to Be Cut Up

    At Alang, Chittagong and Gadani the imagery shows at least 60 ships each, beached and in various stages of demolition. This map follows ships past the end of their working life to 72 shipbreaking yards, ship graveyards and ghost fleets, sorted by method: beach-breaking, slipway and dockside, drydock. Each site says what the satellite saw and when: about 20 ships at Aliağa in Turkey, 15 in the Brownsville Ship Channel in Texas, no activity at Graythorp in Hartlepool. The ghost fleets as of 2012 have thinned: 24 ships in the Delaware River in Philadelphia, 10 left in Suisun Bay.

    

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    7272 points

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    United StatesChinaIndiaand 28 more

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19. WW2 Warship Wrecks Map: 182 Ships, Sorted Like a Game

    The layers are named after the factions of the game Azur Lane, Sakura Empire, Iron Blood, Eagle Union and Royal Navy, and the Japanese ships keep the game’s spelling, Hyuuga and Ryuujou, but the 182 pins are real wrecks. Each gives the fate and the date: Tirpitz capsized under the RAF’s 12,000-pound Tallboy bombs on 12 November 1944, Kaga scuttled at Midway, HMS Hardy beached in Narvik in 1940. Where history is unsure, so is the map: U-47 is “MIA”, with only unconfirmed reports that HMS Wolverine sank her.

    

    Objects

    182182 points

    Countries

    NorwayJapanSolomon Islandsand 11 more

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    Google My Maps

20. Baltic Oil Wrecks Map: 27 Wrecks Still Holding Fuel

    The destroyer Gnevnyi lies somewhere near Hiiumaa with an estimated 548 tonnes of oil on board, the destroyer Smetlivyi with 540. This Finnish map lists 27 wrecks in the northern Baltic that could leak, each with the oil it may still hold: the coastal defence ship Ilmarinen 93 tonnes, the icebreaker Hindenburg 140, the submarine Pravda, sunk off Hanko in 1941, 93. Most of the submarine positions are only approximate, and the Eira and the Park Victory are marked as already emptied.

    

    Objects

    2727 points

    Countries

    Russian FederationÅland IslandsFinland

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