Low water levels in the inner city of Stockholm, Sweden, have exposed the remains of two ships, thought to be 17th century Danish warships.
The wooden stumps of the ship beams are exposed above the water surface, showing that one of the ships was approximately 30 meters long, about as long as the famous 17th century Vasa ship.
"If it had only been one or two beams sticking up, I may not have noticed it. But I saw immediately that it was a shipwreck," said archaeologist Jim Hansson of Stockholm's Maritime Museum, who spotted the shipwrecks while out for a walk on Kastellholmen island with his girlfriend.
The presence of one of the ships at Kastellholmen had been known to experts since the 1940s, but the ship was never studied and its existence had more or less been forgotten. With the lower than usual water levels in Stockholm Harbour revealing both ships, researchers have taken the opportunity to take wood samples from both vessels for testing.
With these samples, archaeologists hope to confirm the shipwrecks to be the Grå Ulven ('Gray Wolf'), a Danish-built man-of-war that reportedly sunk in Stockholm harbour in 1670, and another 17th century Danish ship called Den Stora Draken ('The Big Dragon').
"We know that the wrecks were sunk in the area," according to Andreas Olsson of the Maritime Museum.
