Heritage

122 heritage for peace and reconciliation | manual for teacherContentsbeen severely damaged by depth charges. Its bow shows numerous post-sinkingimpacts caused by either the Irish or British Navy. Damage was also caused bythe removal of three of the four propellers in 1982. One diver who exploredthe wreck in the 1990s, reported that it was ‘like Swiss cheese’, and the seabed around her was ‘littered with unexploded hedgehog mines’. In addition,in 1982, various items from the wreck’s mysterious cargo were recovered andbrought ashore in the United Kingdom, triggering a legal battle that ended inthe denial of protection for the wreck.Passage of timeTime also endangers many metal wrecks due corrosion processes, which canlead to the build-up of rusticles, icicle-like formations caused by such a process,triggered by bacteria.© NOAARusticles on the wreck of RMS TitanicThe endangered heritage of JutlandThe Battle of Jutland (Skagerrakschlacht) was fought between the British and GermanNavies on 31 May and 1 June 1916 in the North Sea near Jutland, Denmark. It wasboth the largest naval battle and the only full-scale clash of battleships in the FirstWorld War.The wreck of the Invincible was found by the Royal Navy minesweeper HMS Oakleyin 1919. After the Second World War, some of the wrecks were commerciallysalvaged. For example, the Hydrographic Office record for SMS Lützow shows thatsalvage operations took place on the wreck in 1960. In 2000–2001 a series of divingexpeditions located the wrecks of the Defence, the Indefatigable and the Nomad. Duringthese expeditions, it was discovered that the Indefatigable had also been rippedapart by salvers. In 2003, a detailed survey of the wrecks of Jutland was undertaken.