Wreck diving
recreational diving on submerged wrecks
Wreck diving is recreational diving where the wreckage of ships, aircraft and other artificial structures are explored. The term is used mainly by recreational and technical divers. Professional divers, when diving on a shipwreck, generally refer to the specific task, such as salvage work, accident investigation or archaeological survey. Although most wreck dive sites are at shipwrecks, there is an increasing trend to scuttle retired ships to create artificial reef sites. Diving to crashed aircraft can also be considered wreck diving. The recreation of wreck diving makes no distinction as to how the vessel ended up on the bottom.
Some wreck diving involves penetration of the wreckage, making a direct ascent to the surface impossible for a part of the dive.
Environment
The environment of wreck diving is sunken shipwrecks and other vehicles and structures, either sunk by misfortune, acts of war, or intentionally, as targets in military exercises, to serve as artificial reefs, or as recreational dive sites for the diving tourism industry. Wrecks sunk as tourist dive sites are usually cleaned up and have many hazards removed before scuttling, and are usually sunk in a place where the other natural hazards are not too serious. Wrecks sunk through misadventure tend to be in places with a wider range of environmental hazards, in many cases contributing to the wrecking event.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “Wreck diving” as recreational diving on submerged wrecks. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
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The subject matters to the general reference register because the source frames it as recreational diving on submerged wrecks. Its deeper value depends on whether names, dates, institutions and citations support that framing.
Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated May 15, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q2268313. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference.
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This entry incorporates text from “Wreck diving” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.