Wikipedia's volunteers have listed 243,071 shipwrecks, year by year, from 1700 to today. Count them and three of the five worst years are war years: 1944, with 4,570, then 1917 and 1942. But the list is also a portrait of its sources, and of the British newspapers that recorded every lost collier and brig in the nineteenth century.
Ships have always been lost: driven ashore in gales, sunk in collisions, burnt, torpedoed. For three centuries, somebody has usually written it down. Wikipedia's volunteers have gathered those notices into a remarkable set of pages, one "List of shipwrecks" for every month from the 1820s onwards and for every year or decade before, each entry with the ship, its flag, what happened and often a source. I turned all of them into one table: 243,071 wrecks once duplicates are removed.
That table is the backbone of this page. Its timeline shows how many wrecks were recorded each year, by cause and by flag, and the two world wars stand out exactly as you would expect. Its great nineteenth-century plateau is more about record keeping than danger: those pages lean heavily on British newspapers, above all Lloyd's List, which reported every British loss it heard of. The map below adds every wreck I could find with coordinates: 15,133 of the Wikipedia entries, 30,821 wrecks from Wikidata and 6,170 from the United States' wreck charts.
From almost nothing in the early 1700s (8.4 entries a year before 1750), the lists climb steeply through the age of sail, peaking at 3,794 in 1880. Between 1850 and 1879 they average 2,746 wrecks a year. Then they fall away: from 1890 to 1913 the average is just 483. Ships did become safer as sail gave way to steam, but much of that drop is in the record, not the sea: the newspaper runs that editors worked through simply thin out.
Then come the wars. The First World War averages 2,064 wrecks a year, 4.3 times the years before it, with 4,083 in 1917, the year of unrestricted submarine warfare. The Second World War averages 3,044 a year, 6.9 times the interwar rate, with 4,027 in 1942 and 4,570 in 1944, the highest of any year. 69% of the Second World War entries were lost to war: torpedoes, bombs from aircraft, mines and gunfire. Since 1966 the lists hold about 137 wrecks a year.
Shipwrecks listed on Wikipedia, per year, 1700 to 2025
242,555 entries with a year. Colour by cause or by flag. Shaded: the two world wars. Hover a bar.
It counts wrecks that made it into Wikipedia's lists, not all wrecks. The lists are compiled by volunteers from whatever sources they can reach, and for the nineteenth century that means mostly British newspapers and Lloyd's List: 66% of the 1800s entries are British ships. Losses of small craft, of ships from countries without such a press, and of anything after the 1880s newspaper runs are far less complete. Read the height of the bars as "how much was recorded and found", and compare the shapes within a period rather than across them.
Most nineteenth-century wrecks were not dramatic: 65% of them ran aground or were driven ashore, and 14% foundered at sea. Over the whole period the lists record a cause for 88% of entries.
Why ships were lost
All 242,555 dated list entries, by cause. Hover a bar.
Over the whole period 56% of the listed wrecks flew the British flag, then the United States (10.2%), Germany, France and Norway. The British share is highest in the 1800s (66%), which is partly the size of the British merchant fleet and partly the British sources. In the Second World War the mix is much wider: Britain falls to 24%, and German, Japanese, Italian and Soviet losses join the list. Switch the chart above to "Flag" to watch the change.
Listed wrecks by flag
Flags grouped across regimes (for example the German Empire and Nazi Germany as Germany). Darker part: lost 1939 to 1945. Hover a bar.
Most list entries have no coordinates. The 15,133 that do are mostly war losses, whose positions were logged at the time, so they spread across the North Atlantic, the Mediterranean, the North Sea and the Pacific. To them I add Wikidata's wrecks and the American charts. Press play to watch them accumulate; filter by cause, record and flag; and click any dot.
Dots: 52,124 wrecks with a place. 18,596 have a year of loss and follow the slider and decade buttons; the 33,528 undated wrecks show only while "Show undated wrecks" is ticked, and play hides them. While playing, wrecks lost in the last three years are drawn larger. Pale rings with a number mark 20 or more wrecks recorded at exactly one spot. Causes and vessel types come from short descriptions and are not known for every wreck. Flags are shown for Wikipedia list entries and the "other" Wikidata wrecks; for the Scottish and Welsh imports Wikidata gives the country the wreck lies in, not the flag. Sources: Wikipedia contributors (CC BY-SA); Wikidata (CC0), including records imported from Canmore and Coflein; NOAA Office of Coast Survey, AWOIS. Outlines: Natural Earth. Base map tiles © Esri.
The map is lopsided in its own way. 61% of the mapped wrecks lie in UK waters, 45% off Scotland, because Wikidata took in two bulk imports from Canmore and Coflein, the heritage records of Scotland and Wales. Scotland has 10.6 times as many mapped wrecks as England, which certainly lost more ships. The United States has 16%, nearly all from its own wreck charts. Everywhere else together has 23%.
Where the mapped wrecks come from
All mapped wrecks and those with a year, by record. Hover a block.
The densest wreck fields on the map are Scottish: the Firth of Clyde (2,676 wrecks), the Firth of Forth (2,588) and Orkney and Scapa Flow (2,412), where the German High Seas Fleet scuttled itself in 1919. The US coast of the Gulf of Mexico has 1,398 and the English Channel, thanks largely to the wartime positions in the Wikipedia lists, 953. Famous Pacific graveyards are still thin: Truk Lagoon, where a whole Japanese fleet lies on the bottom, has 20, Ironbottom Sound off Guadalcanal 11 and the Torres Strait 1.
Named wreck graveyards
Wrecks inside a simple box around each area. Click a row to zoom the map there.
What kind of vessel
The 12,023 mapped wrecks whose type is recorded. Hover a bar.
The lists start in 1700, but Wikidata reaches much further back. The oldest dated wrecks are the Dokos wreck in Greece (about 2150 BC), the Uluburun ship off southern Turkey (1305 BC), with its cargo of copper, tin and glass, and the Antikythera wreck (61 BC), famous for its mechanism. For antiquity a scholarly catalogue does better: the Summary Geodatabase of Shipwrecks from Harvard's Mapping Past Societies project, which builds on the Oxford Roman Economy Project, lists 1,936 wrecks from 1500 BC to AD 1500. Spreading each over its date range, the busiest century is the AD 1st century, with about 382: the height of Roman trade. I show it only as counts per century, because its licence is not stated in the copy I used.
Ancient and medieval wrecks per century
Wrecks in the Summary Geodatabase of Shipwrecks with a date range of 300 years or less (1,598), each spread evenly over its range. Hover a bar.
The oldest dated wrecks
Year of loss, and how I got it. Click a row to see it on the map.
The timeline of shipwrecks is half a history of loss and half a history of the people who wrote the losses down.
The lists. A table scraped from every English Wikipedia "List of shipwrecks" page for 1700 to 2025 (monthly pages from the 1820s, yearly and decade pages before) gave 252,288 rows with page, date heading, ship, flag, a cause sorted into buckets and, for some, coordinates. I removed 9,217 duplicates of the same ship under the same date heading on the same page, keeping entries for unnamed vessels. Year pages for years that also have monthly pages hold only "Unknown date" entries, so they do not double count. 516 entries from the decade pages have no year and count only by decade. I grouped flags across regimes and spellings and causes into seven groups.
Wikidata and NOAA. Every Wikidata item with coordinates that is a shipwreck or has a shipwrecking event, through the QLever service (30,821 after removing aircraft, islands and items without coordinates), with extra event and date statements to find years of loss. NOAA's Automated Wreck and Obstruction Information System adds 6,170 wrecks in US waters. Wikipedia entries with coordinates that match a mapped wreck of the same name within 20 km (391) are not mapped twice.
Years for the map come from Wikidata dates and events, Canmore's labels for documented losses ("Unknown 1830"), dates after "sunk" in the American survey notes, and the list pages. I never guess a year from a launch date or a war. Graveyards are simple boxes. Places: each wreck is given its nearest present-day country (Natural Earth).
What this is not. It is not a count of all shipwrecks. UNESCO's oft-quoted estimate is of the order of three million wrecks on the sea bed. The timeline counts what volunteers have found in surviving sources, which favours British ships, the nineteenth century and wartime; the map counts what agencies and volunteers have published with coordinates. Depth is not recorded for most wrecks, so I do not attempt a list of the deepest.