Australia Finds Wreck of World War I Submarine, Solving a 103-Year Enigma
The vessel, lost off Papua New Guinea in September 1914, barely seven months after being commissioned for service,
disappeared with 35 crew members during operations to capture the German Pacific colonies in World War I.
The discovery was made by a survey ship, the Fugro Equator,
that was used in another seemingly impossible endeavor: the search for the remains of Malaysia Airlines Flight 370, which disappeared during a flight from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing on March 8, 2014.
Nobody knows what caused the AE1 to sink in 1914 — it had not been under attack at the time — though
theories include an explosion of one of its torpedoes or a failure of a high-pressure air cylinder.
21, 2017
DEC. 21, 2017
LONDON — For more than a century, the fate of Australia’s first military submarine was one of the country’s enduring maritime mysteries.
The AE1 and its sister vessel, the AE2, arrived in Australia in the spring of 1914, crossing half the globe after their construction in England.