Wreck diving and the law: heritage, war graves and reporting.

Three kinds of law

A wreck can be covered by several bodies of law at once, and the sources in this section fall into three groups:

• Heritage protection. Laws that protect wrecks for their historical or archaeological value, sometimes automatically once a wreck reaches a certain age, sometimes only once designated.
• War graves and military wrecks. Laws that protect the remains of warships and military aircraft, often because they hold human remains.
• Reporting and ownership. Salvage and merchant shipping laws that require anyone who recovers material from a wreck to declare it.

The UK's regimes are set out on UK protected wrecks and the US's on US wreck law. This page covers the international convention and four other places.

The UNESCO 2001 Convention

The UNESCO Convention on the Protection of the Underwater Cultural Heritage, adopted in 2001, makes preservation in place (in situ) the first option to consider before any activity directed at underwater heritage, and it bars the commercial exploitation of that heritage. It allows objects to be recovered where that makes a significant contribution to protecting or understanding the heritage. An Annex sets out 36 practical Rules for activities directed at underwater heritage. Our research did not find the current number of countries that are party to the Convention.

Ireland: the 100-year rule

Ireland's rules come from the National Monuments (Amendment) Act 1987, as amended. Our main source is a 2020 leaflet from a local museum that sets out the Act. Ireland's National Monuments Service confirms that diving on protected wrecks is regulated, though its page does not restate the licence rule.

• Diving needs a licence. Under section 3(4), no one may dive on, damage or interfere with any wreck more than 100 years old, or an underwater archaeological object, except under a licence from the Minister. A licence is needed to dive on a protected wreck site, not only to disturb it.
• Finds must be reported. Under section 3(6), anyone who finds a wreck over 100 years old must report it within four days to the Minister or the Garda Siochana, and an underwater archaeological object to the Director of the National Museum of Ireland.
• Detectors need consent. Using a detection device to search for archaeological objects anywhere in the State or its territorial waters, including on wrecks, is unlawful without the Minister's written consent.
• A wreck can be an object. The leaflet records that the High Court (Herbert J, 2005, in a case about the Lusitania) held that a wreck can also be an archaeological object under the Act.

Separately, under Ireland's Merchant Shipping (Salvage and Wreck) Act 1994, all material recovered from a wreck must be declared to the Receiver of Wreck. Undeclared material is treated as stolen goods, and boarding a wreck without the permission of its owner or master is forbidden.

We could not confirm whether the Historic and Archaeological Heritage and Miscellaneous Provisions Act 2023 has changed these rules, so check with the National Monuments Service.

Australia: the 75-year rule

Wikipedia (secondary) records that Australia's Underwater Cultural Heritage Act 2018, enacted on 24 August 2018, repealed the Historic Shipwrecks Act 1976. According to Wikipedia and the federal government's fact sheet, the Act automatically protects all shipwrecks and their artefacts that have been in Australian waters for 75 years or more, whether or not their location is known, and sunken aircraft that have been in Commonwealth waters for 75 years or more. Newer wrecks and other sites can be protected by ministerial declaration.

Areas around protected heritage can be declared protected zones, most of about 200 hectares. Wikipedia lists about 30 wrecks in such zones, including HMAS Sydney, the SS Yongala and the Dutch East India Company ship Zuytdorp.

Search summaries of the federal fact sheet, which we could not open, describe it as an offence to do anything with an adverse impact on protected underwater heritage without a permit, while people remain free to visit most protected sites subject to conditions. A summary of South Australia's government FAQ says that state's waters remain under its own Historic Shipwrecks Act 1981. We could not confirm either point directly.

The SS Yongala

The Yongala lies inside the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park. A 1990 explanatory statement records that an earlier protected-zone arrangement had let divers enter without a permit on a look-but-do-not-touch basis, and that a 1990 amendment removed that access after incidents that damaged the wreck. The general rule then applied: activities likely to damage or interfere with the wreck need a permit.

The sources disagree on what recreational divers need today. A liveaboard company says access is by permit only, obtained through the Museum of Tropical Queensland. The Reef Authority's maritime heritage page refers to permits for cultural heritage work such as monitoring and research. We could not confirm the current requirement for recreational divers.

Malta: heritage wreck sites

Malta manages a set of historic wreck sites through Heritage Malta. Visit Malta lists them with depths of roughly 55 m to 115 m, for example HMS Olympus at 115 m, so most are dives at technical depths. Access is through dive centres approved by Heritage Malta; none is named here.

A diving-information site, writing in February 2024 about Transport Malta Notice 002 of 2024, says divers must be appropriately certified and either be Maltese residents in a local club subscribed to the Heritage Malta Shipwreck Club, or dive with a school authorised by Heritage Malta from a vessel permitted by its Underwater Cultural Heritage Unit. Search summaries of Transport Malta's earlier notices (2021 and January 2023) describe the sites' buffer areas as no-stopping areas and say breaches can lead to a ban on stopping or diving there; we could not confirm those details from the notices themselves.

Chuuk Lagoon (Micronesia): a disputed status

Chuuk (Truk) Lagoon holds Japanese wrecks from the Second World War. The Christian Science Monitor reported on 18 September 1991 that divers signed an agreement not to remove anything from the wrecks, with fines and jail possible, but that enforcement was limited. We found no text of a Chuuk State law protecting the wrecks, or of any current permit system.

Sources disagree on whether the wrecks are war graves. Travel sources say the Japanese wrecks are treated as war graves. A writer in Scuba Diving magazine says the local government does not recognise them as such and that no law stops divers disturbing remains. The same writer notes that Japanese expeditions recovered most of the human remains in the 1980s with Chuuk State's permission.

Diving wrecks within your training

Several of these sites are deep, and wrecks can have enclosed spaces. What the agencies and fatality studies say about staying within training is on diving within your training, and overhead environments are described on environmental hazards.