Researchers reconstruct one of the worst shipwrecks in German trade history

In 1952, the freighter MS Melanie Schulte sank in the Atlantic. Wreckage suggests that the ship broke apart. The cause of this could never be finally clarified. Researchers from the Helmholtz-Zentrum Hereon have now investigated whether exceptionally high waves and a particularly strong storm could have led to the sinking of the freighter.

The last known position of the Melanie Schulte is in the North Atlantic, west of Scotland. The ship made its last radio call there on December 21, 1952. Then it sank. This was confirmed by pieces of wreckage that washed ashore in Scotland a month later. They showed that the material was partially broken.

But why did a ship 136 meters long and 18 meters wide break apart? Assumptions were made in the course of an investigation report and court proceedings: Errors in the ship's design, incorrect navigation, unevenly distributed cargo, excessive sea state. But the actual cause could never be fully clarified.

Hereon researchers have now attempted to scientifically substantiate some of the assumptions. Dr. Ina Teutsch and Dr. Nikolaus Groll from the Institute of Coastal Systems—Analysis and Modeling have used an existing sea state simulation to do so.

Using weather and sea state calculations from December 1952, they were able to estimate how strong the wind and how high the waves were in the North Atlantic at the time of the accident.

The result: the sea state was high, but not unusually. The height of the waves is unlikely to have been the sole cause of the sinking. However, the wave length and the direction from which the waves hit the ship could have been more decisive.

Length and direction of the waves are decisive

According to the calculations, the length of the waves roughly corresponded to the length of the ship. This meant that the freighter was constantly bent back and forth. When it was on a wave, the bow and stern were subjected to greater pressure.

If it was between two waves, it was carried more by the water at the bow and stern, and the middle was more heavily loaded. The structural integrity of the ship could also have been impaired by the fact that the cargo of 9,300 tons of ore was unevenly distributed.

Teutsch's and Groll's sea simulation also shows that the waves probably hit the ship from the side. This also caused it to rock back and forth. "All of these effects probably interacted and weakened the structure of the ship, causing it to break apart," says Groll.

The results of the study confirm assumptions that had previously been made about the sinking of the Melanie Schulte, but could never be fully proven. In 1953, for example, experts drew similar conclusions to Groll and Teutsch. However, at the time they did not have the means to calculate their assumptions using complex sea simulations.

"We have now been able to substantiate the findings empirically," says Groll. For him and his colleague, however, the study means even more: "We usually use the data set we used for this study to investigate how the sea state climate develops. But this study has shown that the data and models can be used for much more."

Background of the study

The study "Sea state observation of the sinking of the MS 'Melanie Schulte' in 1952" was carried out on the initiative of the Ostfriesisches Landesmuseum in Emden. The museum had dedicated a special exhibition to the freighter. Teutsch and Groll provided scientific content for this exhibition.

The Melanie Schulte was a general cargo freighter owned by the Emden shipping company Schulte & Bruns and the Hamburg trading company Toepfer. The ship sank just a few weeks after being put into service. The sinking is considered one of the worst shipping disasters in German trading history after the Second World War.

More information:
Ina Teutsch et al, Seegangsbetrachtung zum Untergang der MS "MELANIE SCHULTE" im Jahr 1952, Kuratorium für Forschung im Küsteningenieurwesen (Hrsg.), via Bundesanstalt für Wasserbau (2023). DOI: 10.18171/1.093104

Provided by Helmholtz Association of German Research Centres