COPPER CARGO
At a depth of 7 m at the bottom of
the Greifswald Bodden, underwater
archaeologists discovered a payload
of 69 plates of copper in a shipwreck
from the 15th century. The plates
weigh between 2.5 and 78 kg each,
1,612 kg all told. Some bear a ma-
ker’s mark. Every one of them was
sampled to determine its place of
origin, and desalinated to stop
corrosion. Construction of the NEL
pipeline led to the discovery.