Internat J Naut Archaeol 29 (2)

The paper presents a broad survey of Irish shipwrecks that correlate with historic storms in an attempt to quantify the extent of these incidents, and relate the weather observations of the distressed vessels to those at meteorological stations, as well as those put forward by meteorologists reconstructing past conditions.

In 1997 the University of Ulster in partnership with the Environment and Heritage Service (DOE, NI) embarked on a programme of seabed mapping in an attempt to record the submerged and buried archaeological resource using a suite of geophysical equipment including a side-scan sonar, a Chirp sub-bottom profiler and a proton precession magnetometer. The geophysical research programme has successfully imaged eighty nineteenth- and twentieth-century wrecks, and twenty targets of further archaeological potential. It is posited that these data will aid the production of wreck-prediction indices for the coastline of Northern Ireland based on site formation processes and site stability, and that the information will make valuable additions to both Sites and Monuments Records and to the shipwreck database under consideration at the University of Ulster at the time of writing.