Continued Documentation of the Coastal Landscape Off the Datça Peninsula, Turkey

Since 2008, we have been documenting the coastal deep water (50-600 m) off southwestern Turkey around the Bodrum and Datca peninsulas. Over the past Four years of expeditions, culminating in this past summer's work, we explored large areas of seabed and documented features such as rock ridges and slumps from the steep slopes or the peninsula, carbonate crusts from methane seeps, numerous ancient shipwrecks, and areas of seabed scarred by heavy bottom trawling activity (Brennan et al., 2011). Combining these data has allowed us to begin mapping the direct effect of trawling on the destruction of shipwreck sites in deep water. Wreck sites located in the rocky areas we documented west and northwest of Knidos are less damaged than those south or Knidos in flat terrain, where trawling is generally conducted parallel to isobaths. The 25 ancient wrecks found in these areas of the southeastern Aegean Sea comprise a sufficiently large database for initiating spatial comparisons between wrecks to help evaluate differences in the modern sites on the seabed.