Australia Finds Wreck of World War I Submarine, Solving a 103-Year Enigma<br />The vessel, lost off Papua New Guinea in September 1914, barely seven months after being commissioned for service,<br />disappeared with 35 crew members during operations to capture the German Pacific colonies in World War I.<br />The discovery was made by a survey ship, the Fugro Equator,<br />that was used in another seemingly impossible endeavor: the search for the remains of Malaysia Airlines Flight 370, which disappeared during a flight from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing on March 8, 2014.<br />Nobody knows what caused the AE1 to sink in 1914 — it had not been under attack at the time — though<br />theories include an explosion of one of its torpedoes or a failure of a high-pressure air cylinder.<br />21, 2017<br />DEC. 21, 2017<br />LONDON — For more than a century, the fate of Australia’s first military submarine was one of the country’s enduring maritime mysteries.<br />The AE1 and its sister vessel, the AE2, arrived in Australia in the spring of 1914, crossing half the globe after their construction in England.
