A mysterious ship has washed up on the coast of Ireland after Storm Dennis raged over the weekend. It has been abandoned since 2018, drifting in the sea with no crew.
The MV Alta cargo ship, which is believed to have originated in Tanzania, was spotted in Ballycotton, County Cork, on Sunday morning (16 February).
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The Irish Coast Guard says a 10-man crew had been rescued from the 77-metre freighter after it became disabled back in October 2018.
The ship was on its way from Greece to Haiti when it got into some trouble and drifted for almost 20 days. A rescue mission was launched when the crew radioed for help after running low on food and water.
The stranded shipmates were eventually taken off the freighter when they were about 2,220km off the coast of Bermuda, and since then the ship has continued to drift eastwards.
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Following the powerful winds from Storm Dennis, it has now crashed against the rocks of Ballycotton.
Speaking about the find, Ballycotton RNLI Lifeboat Operations manager John Tattan told The Irish Examiner: "This is one in a million.
"It has come all the way up from the African coast, west of the Spanish coast, west of the English coast and up to the Irish coast.
"I have never, ever seen anything abandoned like that before."
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It's understood that the Coast Guard will be monitoring the situation to determine whether the ship poses a threat to the local environment.
This comes after The Met Office issued a 'danger to life' warning ahead of the weekend, predicting heavy rain and strong winds across the majority of the UK.
At the time, experts even warned that Dennis may bring a 'weather bomb' with him.
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Met Office meteorologist Simon Partridge told LADbible: "A weather bomb, which actually unbelievably is a meteorological term, is a low pressure system which deepens more than 24 millibars in 24 hours. So it's basically an area of low pressure that deepens very quickly, and that's a weather bomb.
"Storm Dennis has deepened by more than 24 millibars in 24 hours, so it certainly ticks the box for that one."
According to the Met Office, low pressure systems often lead to unsettled weather conditions and rainfall.
Simon continued: "It will probably reach its lowest pressure by late tonight, so through this evening and overnight, where it could get as low as a 1,020 millibars, which will make it one of the lowest low pressure systems ever recorded in the North Atlantic - it is a very, very deep low pressure system.
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"The actual centre of the low will be closer to Iceland than it is to the UK, but it's such a large and deep low pressure system that it will still have that strong effect on the UK.
"Hopefully we're far enough away that the winds won't be quite so significant as what we saw last week, but we will still see 50 to 60mph gusts of wind quite widely across the UK. Locally, particularly around the western coast we could see up to 70mph gusts."
Featured Image Credit: Michael Mac SweeneyTopics: Ireland, Weather, World News, Interesting, Weird