Sinking a military cargo plane on purpose might sound like something out of an action movie, but that is exactly what happened off the coast of Aqaba, Jordan, in November 2017. A retired Royal Jordanian Air Force C-130 Hercules, once used to move troops and supplies, was towed out to sea and intentionally sunk to create an artificial reef. The study, ‘Fish Colonization of an Artificial Reef in the Gulf of Elat, Northern Red Sea,’ published in Environmental Biology of Fishes, tracked a different artificial reef roughly 25 kilometers away in the Gulf of Elat (Eilat), on the same gulf where Aqaba sits, and recorded 94 fish species over a period of 728 days. That is the kind of change this sunken plane was meant to create.
A war plane's second life underwater
