Researchers are confident they have identified the wreck site of HMS Stephen Furness, sunk in 1917 along with over 100 of her crew, after over a century at the bottom of the Irish Sea thanks to the Towards a National Collection project which combines expertise from 25 organisations from across the UK led by .
, an £18.9m investment from the UKRI (AHRC) has been set up to connect separate collections, dissolving barriers and unifying data in a digital ‘hyper network’ across the UK’s museums, galleries, libraries and archives.
Its Unpath’d Waters project adopted new approaches to investigate shipwreck sites and a team from ÑÇÖÞÉ«°É's School of Ocean Sciences believe they have finally identified the possible remains of HMS Stephen Furness, missing since December 1917 after being torpedoed with the loss of over 100 lives. This discovery has only been made possible by combining existing documentary resources with new scientific datasets identified and accessed by project researchers thanks to innovative digital techniques.
The team analysed high-resolution multibeam sonar data collected by ÑÇÖÞÉ«°É’s research vessel Prince Madog to examine the dimensions of all known wreck sites in the region. Combining this information with other resources, including an account of an attack position containe