2015 Judges' Overall Winner
Jennifer Chow
School of Arts, Languages and Cultures, Faculty of Humanities
The last sailors on the Mary Rose
This Environmental Scanning Electron Microscope (ESEM) scan shown here is of a single strand of wood fibre from a wooden fragment off of the Mary Rose warship that sank on the 19th of July, 1545. Understanding how the wood had survived for more than 400 years in the seabed is vital towards allowing us to know how we can preserve underwater wooden heritage better.
In the picture, an oval structure and several other worm-like structures are shown, they are known as diatoms. They are considered to be one of the most successful group of unicellular algae, with their distinctive siliceous cell walls which resist degradation, allowing us to use them to understand more about the history of the sea. Diatom shells are extremely robust structures that are usually found within sediment layers in marine and fresh waters.
