Coverage and Scope

The data model, the map and the editorial standard are built to extend worldwide, and coverage grows region by region. This page sets out exactly what the map holds today, so that distinction is never left ambiguous.

A wreck gets a record when published sources establish that it is a distinct, identified vessel lost at a known place, and when there is enough sourced material to describe it: what it was, how it was lost, where it lies and in what condition. Raised and broken-up vessels are kept where their loss or their remains matter historically.

Legal protection sits in its own fields on each record: protected sites may require a licence, war graves prohibit artefact removal, and some sites may not be visited at all without permission from the authority that controls them.

4 of the 223 wreck records have a page but no marker on the map:

• 4 with a position withheld by policy: the record’s visibility state does not allow publication. Their pages give the location in words.

Protected wrecks and war graves that do have a marker are shown to about 1 km at most; see how positions are published.

Every factual field is meant to point at an evidence record, and every evidence record has fields for a source name, a source URL, a source date, an excerpt and a confidence rating. Those fields are not all populated to the same depth, so the gaps are reported here directly.

• 7406 evidence records support 223 wreck records.
• 104 of 7406 carry a source date. For the remaining 7302 the age of the underlying claim cannot be assessed from the record. Dates are never inferred or back-filled to close this gap.
• 219 of 223 wreck records carry an explicit position visibility state. Where the state is not set, the position is withheld rather than shown.
• 305 recorded source conflicts. Each is shown on the wreck page it affects rather than resolved silently.

• Wrecks with no usable published evidence. Absence here means nothing was recorded, not that nothing is there.
• Exact positions for protected sites and war graves, and positions whose source does not permit redistribution; see the methodology.
• Sea conditions, forecasts and any form of dive guidance.

New regions are added in batches: research against published sources first, then structured extraction with evidence attached per field, then review. A region goes live when its records carry enough sourced detail to answer the questions the rest of the map answers, not when the wreck names are known.

Gaps in an existing region are expected and visible. If a wreck you know is missing from a covered region, that is a gap worth reporting.