By Sid Perkins
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BARCELONA, SPAIN — Newly released images of the seafloor near Ireland depict scattered tidbits of history both old and new, from gouges scraped by icebergs during the last ice age to the wreckage of the Lusitania and hulks of German U-boats sunk by the British navy at the end of World War II.
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The territorial waters of Ireland cover an area exceeding 890,000 square kilometers, about 10 times the size of the country’s land area, said John Joyce of the Marine Institute in Dublin, speaking July 21 during the Euroscience Open Forum in Barcelona, Spain.
In 1996, scientists began scanning the seafloor with sonar as part of the Irish National Seabed Survey, one of several similar programs underway in Europe, where territorial waters of the continent actually include more area than its landmass does, Joyce said. When the Irish program began, the effort was the largest civilian underwater mapping effort in the world, Joyce added.