Historical records indicate the Gairsoppa was carrying up to seven million ounces of silver and the Mantola was carrying approximately 600,000 ounces of silver when each sank.
Odyssey discovered both shipwrecks in Q3 2011 and conducted a series of reconnaissance dives to both sites in March and April 2012.
The 48 ton cargo was on board the SS Gairsoppa, a 412-foot steel-hulled British cargo ship that sank in February 1941.
The merchant ship was sailing off the coast of Galway in Ireland when it was torpedoed by a German U-boat during the Second World War. It was being used by the Government under their War Risk insurance programme.
An insurance payment of £325,000, the value in 1941, was made by the Government to the owners of the cargo. The Government gave Odyssey the contract to locate the ship several years ago and will receive 20% of the value of the haul.
More than a thousand bars of silver have been recovered from a shipwreck three miles beneath the Atlantic off the coast of Ireland.
The treasure is the heaviest and deepest collection of precious metals ever recovered from a ship wreck, according to Odyssey Marine Exploration, the American company responsible for the haul.
The total bounty amounted to 1,203 silver bars or approximately 1.4 million troy ounces of silver.
Odyssey Marine Exploration Inc. (OMEX), a deep-ocean exploration company, said it recovered about 48 tons of silver from a World War II shipwreck three miles (4.8 kilometers) beneath the Atlantic Ocean.
The company retrieved 1,203 silver bars, or about 1.4 million ounces of the metal, from the SS Gairsoppa, a 412-foot (126-meter) British cargo ship that sank after being torpedoed by German U-boat in February 1941, Tampa, Florida-based Odyssey said today in a statement. The metal, worth $38 million at today’s prices, is being held at a secure facility in the U.K.
Odyssey said the recovered silver represents about 20 percent of the bullion that may be on board the Gairsoppa, which lies about 300 miles off the coast of Ireland. The operation, the largest and deepest recovery of precious metals from a shipwreck, should be completed in the third quarter.
“With the shipwreck lying approximately three miles below the surface of the North Atlantic, this was a complex operation,” Greg Stemm, Odyssey chief executive officer, said in the statement. “Our success on the Gairsoppa marks the beginning of a new paradigm for Odyssey in which we expect modern shipwreck projects will complement our archaeological shipwreck excavations.”
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