Shipwrecks of the World, and How Many over Time: Three Centuries of Recorded Losses

English Wikipedia lists shipwrecks month by month from the 1820s and year by year or decade by decade before that. I turned every list from 1700 to 2025 into one table of 243,071 wrecks, after removing 9,217 duplicates, and counted them by year, cause and flag. Three of the five worst years are war years: 1944 (4,570 wrecks), 1917 (4,083) and 1942 (4,027). The Second World War averages 3,044 listed wrecks a year, 6.9 times the interwar rate, and 69% of its entries were lost to torpedoes, aircraft, mines or gunfire. But the series is shaped as much by its sources as by the sea: 71% of all entries are from the 1800s, when the lists average 2,746 wrecks a year from 1850 to 1879, and 66% of those are British ships, reflecting the British newspapers and Lloyd's List from which the pages were compiled; between 1890 and 1913 the average falls to 483. Most nineteenth-century losses were strandings (65%). I pair the series with a map of 52,124 wrecks with coordinates from the lists, Wikidata (including bulk imports from the Scottish and Welsh heritage records) and NOAA's wreck charts, which has its own strong bias: 61% of mapped wrecks lie in UK waters. Both are records of recording as much as of loss. Interactive version: https://maps.tristanhotham.com/world-shipwrecks/. Data and code: https://github.com/Tristan-Hotham/world-shipwrecks. Blog post: https://blog.tristanhotham.com/2026/10/31/world-shipwrecks/. Data: Wikipedia contributors, Lists of shipwrecks (CC BY-SA 4.0; the derived table is shared under the same licence); Wikidata (CC0), including records imported from Canmore and Coflein; NOAA Office of Coast Survey, AWOIS (public domain); Natural Earth.