10 award-winning photos capture eerie underwater scenes of shipwrecks, rusted tanks, and a sunken passenger plane
Mia Jankowicz
- The Underwater Photographer of the Year competition has announced its winners for 2024.
- One eerie category, "wrecks," showcases sunken ships, tanks, a plane, and a helicopter.
The 2024 winners of the Underwater Photographer of the Year competition have been announced, showcasing submerged scenes as diverse as a diver among a graveyard of whale skeletons, a sunken helicopter, and kissing carp.
One category, "wrecks," speaks to our special fascination with submerged ships, tanks, and other military hardware that have come to rest on the ocean floor over hundreds of years.
In the photographs, military cargo, ship's wheels, and even passenger airline seats all remain eerily intact in their watery resting places.
While several of the photos come from Jordan's Underwater Military Museum, where hardware is sunk on purpose as a diving attraction, others have more chilling stories stemming from wars and tragic accidents.
Here are 10 of the best "wrecks" shots, according to the judges.
Two sunken Chieftain tanks at the underwater military museum in Aqaba, Jordan.
Two Chieftain tanks have been sunk among the reefs in the Red Sea, in a tactical battle formation between 50-90 feet underwater.
Photographer Martin Broen said he wanted to "capture the symmetry of the Chieftain Tanks and strong presence of their 120mm guns."
The shot won the 2024 "wrecks" category.
The wheel of this 19th-century wooden schooner is still intact at the bottom of Lake Huron.
"This is an image I've been trying to perfect for almost six years," photographer Becky Kagan Schott said.
The Kyle Spangler is a wooden two-masted schooner that sank in 1860 after crashing into another vessel, taking 15,000 bushels of wheat to the lake floor with it.
The wreck is considered to be one of the best-preserved schooners in the lake, according to Thunder Bay National Marine Sanctuary.
A split-second shot catches a shoal of fish resembling a boat's sail in Brazil.
Photographer Fabi Fregonesi traveled to the Virgo, a boat sunk to create a dive site near Recife, Brazil, and caught this once-in-a-lifetime shot.
"Seconds after that, the fish formation changed," she said.
Rows of silt-covered motorbikes, never to be ridden, are seen inside a WW2 cargo steamship.
The SS Thistlegorm was sunk off the coast of Egypt in 1941, carrying a cargo of armored vehicles, motorbikes, artillery and ammunition, and railway equipment. It was spotted and bombed by German aircraft.
Much later, it was tracked down by Jacques Cousteau — and more recently, by photographer Alex Dawson, who took this stunning image.
This photographer used a lamp to simulate an active engine in this plane under the sea.
This passenger plane was — thankfully — scuttled on purpose in Aqaba, Jordan. Still, it makes for an evocative image, thanks in part to the photographer's attempt to make it look like the plane is about to take off.
"I placed a powerful light on a small tripod in the jet engine to create the effect of a powered engine," Christian Horras said.
Another eerie view inside a sunken Lockheed passenger plane shows row upon row of unoccupied seats.
Photographer Alvaro Herrero says he borrowed a cave photography technique called the "butt light" to get this shot. That's where one diver swims behind another, hidden from the camera, shining a light to illuminate them from behind.
This freight ship crashed so hard, it broke in half.
Here, photographer Becky Kagan Schott captured the catastrophic damage that a crash caused to the bulk freighter S.S. Norman, which sank in 1895 in Lake Huron.
The ship "was hit so hard it cut the freighter in half sending it into the depths and taking the lives of three crew members," she said.
Almost 200ft underwater, this WW1 battleship's gun barrels still seem ready for action.
The super-dreadnought HMS Audacious fell victim to a sea mine in 1914, exploding and then sinking off the coast of Northern Ireland.
Photographer Kieran Hatton said he caught this shot when he saw another diver in the area and quickly passed her his light, while asking her to swim down the 13.5-inch gun barrels.
The photographer said he had just 20 minutes to get this stunning shot of a sunken helicopter.
Photographer Álvaro Herrero said he had just a few minutes to get this shot of a Bell AH-1F Cobra, sunk off the coast of Jordan.
"This photograph was one of the most challenging I have taken," he said. In the short time they had left underwater, he decided to illuminate the windows and instructed the diver in the picture so that he could catch the light's reflection in his mask.
A world of anemones and marine worms hangs from this wreck in a Norwegian fjord.
This German rescue steamer, the Parat, was sunk by Allied forces off the Norwegian coast in 1944 as it attempted to come to the aid of a German freighter that had run aground.
Today, "the dive site looks very barren initially," photographer Guilhem Duprat said. But once you get closer "the wreck has become an oasis" covered in sea life, he said.
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