Wrecks — how this layer is made

What you are looking at

Each dot is something that crashed, sank or was left where it stopped. There are more than 18,000 worldwide. Colour represents which of five kinds it is, and where an outline has been traced the size of a dot represents its footprint. Click on any of them to see what OpenStreetMap records, such as who looks after it and its website. If there's a Wikipedia article, we show a short summary and a link to the full article, in your own language where possible.

Where the data comes from

Every feature here is something a mapper added at the OpenStreetMap website, from a survey, from local knowledge, from diving records or from aerial imagery. We don't model or estimate anything ourselves, and we haven't merged in any hydrographic wreck database.

What we include

Five exact tags:

`historic=wreck` is a vessel that sank.
`historic=ship` is a vessel preserved and on display.
`historic=aircraft` is the largest class at more than 7,000. It covers a crash site, a memorial to one, and a preserved airframe on a plinth.
`historic=locomotive` is more than 2,000 features and `historic=railway_car` is more than 1,000. Both are rolling stock left where it stopped or kept as a monument.

We name the layer for wrecks because that is where the weight of it sits. Sunken vessels and aircraft together are about three quarters of the features.

Colour

Colour represents which of the five a feature is. We draw locomotives and carriages in a related pair of colours, since anybody interested in one is usually interested in the other. Preserved ships take a colour well away from the blues of the water, so that a green dot at the quayside does not read as something on the seabed.

A shipwreck and a preserved ship are opposites

Two of the five classes mean nearly the reverse of each other, and OpenStreetMap separates them by a single word. A wreck is a vessel that sank and usually still lies where it sank, such as the Lusitania off Kinsale or the Thistlegorm in the Red Sea. A ship in this layer is a vessel that was saved, such as the Cutty Sark, USS Midway and the Vasa. Check the colour before you read anything else into a dot on the water.

Size

About seven features in ten have no shape at all, which suits the subject, because a wreck is a position on a seabed or a hillside rather than a structure with a floor plan. We draw those at one nominal small size, since a wreck that somebody had time to trace is not a larger event than one nobody traced. Where an outline does exist, the size of a dot represents its footprint in square metres, and a typical one covers about 115 m², which is a large aircraft or a small coaster. At the top of the range are marked areas rather than objects, including the resting place of MS Estonia at nearly 4 square kilometres, the Titanic wreck site and the ghost fleet at Mallows Bay. Those are protected zones and debris fields drawn as polygons, and we cap the size scale so they don't set the scale for everything else.

Where the map is empty

The obvious gap is underwater. A wreck reaches this map only if divers, hydrographic charts or local knowledge put it there, and that coverage is good off north-west Europe and North America and thin almost everywhere else. Please don't read an empty sea as an empty seabed. On land the ordinary caveat applies, and mapping is more complete in well surveyed countries with active mapping communities than elsewhere.

Up to date, mostly

OpenStreetMap is edited continuously, and we take a new copy once every one to three months. A preserved ship that has since been scrapped may still be mapped until a mapper updates it.

Source and licence

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