History Main / SaharanShipwreck

[[caption-width-right:350:"The plan is perfect", [[CuteButPsycho she]] said. "It was off by just a tiny bit", [[MadScientist she]] said. ''Look what [[ForWantOfANail just a tiny bit off]] did!'']]

* Near the beginning of ''Film/TankGirl'', a ship is seen on a dried harbor bottom.

* In ''Film/LawrenceOfArabia'', Lawrence is dumbfounded to see a ship sailing through the Sinai desert. It's actually because he's reached the Suez Canal and it just takes him a minute to realize it.[[note]]The funny thing about this is that ancient versions of the Suez Canal have been constructed and reclaimed by the desert before, in ancient human history. If the Suez Canal of today were to be abandoned, it would eventually sand in.[[/note]]
* An interesting inversion is seen in ''Film/{{Waterworld}}'' during the expedition in the diving bell--a submarine is seen having crashed into the side of a skyscraper in the flooded city.

* An upside-down riverboat is found in ''Film/CowboysAndAliens 500'' miles from any river that can hold it. Apparently, this is the work of the aliens, but the movie then completely forgets about this, and no explanation is provided.
* In one of the most surreal scenes of ''Film/AguirreTheWrathOfGod'', an abandoned ship is found atop a tree in the middle of the jungle. The original script expanded this into an actual subplot[[note]]The Amazon sometimes has drastic changes of water flow so it's actually not that far-fetched for ''a ship to end trapped in a tree''[[/note]] but the final cut leaves it ambiguous and it might as well be a figment of the men's imagination, since they are all mad at that point. Since ''Aguirre'' is the ultimate RiverOfMadness story, this is actually very fitting.
* In the movie ''Film/{{Fitzcarraldo}}'' (also from Creator/WernerHerzog, the director of ''Aguirre'') the titular mad rubber baron moves a steamship through mountains and jungles in order to put it on an unreachable river. (In real life, he had the ship disassembled first.) The movie's [[http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/c2/Fizzcarraldo.jpg?uselang=es prop ship]] was later abandoned in the Peruvian jungle after filming was completed, making it a RealLife version of the trope.
* The 1995 live-action ''Film/FistOfTheNorthStar'' film has a submarine sitting in a middle of a wasteland.
* In ''Film/{{Godzilla 2014}}'', the [=MUTO=] manages to lift and drop a Russian [[ReportingNames "Akula"]] in the middle of a jungle. An "Akula" is a ''submarine''.
* ''Film/TheForceAwakens'' has Jakku, with wrecked Star Destroyers, X-Wings, and others littered across the desert. [[TheHero Rey]] lives in the wreck of an [[WalkingTank AT-AT]].
* A Viking ship in ''Film/LandOfTheLost''.
* ''Film/Oblivion2013'' is set in 2077 after Earth was devastated by an interstellar war. The destruction of our moon led to tsunamis wiping out most of the land, and what's left of the oceans are being drained to provide fuel for fusion reactors. At one point we see the hero riding his CoolBike across a plain with lots of shipwrecks sticking out of the ground, including a nuclear submarine with [[NukeEm all its missile hatches open]].

* Spaceship example: In ''VideoGame/TheDig'', one of the first things Brink and company find on Cocytus is the deserted ruins of a space ship, which also houses the first "ghost" in the game.

* ''Film/{{Oblivion 2013}}'' is set in 2077 after Earth was devastated by an interstellar war. The destruction of our moon led to tsunamis wiping out most of the land, and what's left of the oceans are being drained to provide fuel for fusion reactors. At one point we see the hero riding his CoolBike across a plain with lots of shipwrecks sticking out of the ground, including a nuclear submarine with [[NukeEm all its missile hatches open]].

* A Viking ship in ''Series/LandOfTheLost.''

* In the movie ''Film/{{Fitzcarraldo}}'' (also from Creator/WernerHerzog, the director of ''Aguirre'') the titular mad rubber baron moves a steamship through mountains and jungles in order to put it on an unreachable river. The movie's [[http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/c2/Fizzcarraldo.jpg?uselang=es prop ship]] was later abandoned in the Peruvian jungle after filming was completed, making it a RealLife version of the trope.

** The prequel VideoGame/HomeworldDesertsOfKharak follows the Northern Coalition’s second expedition to recover said spaceship, in an [[BaseOnWheels aircraft carrier on treads]]. In one of the early missions they discover the wreck of the “first” expedition’s carrier.

* ''VideoGame/MadMax'' is absolutely littered with these. The first half of the game takes place on the dried up ocean floor of the coast of Australia. Where the water has gone is never explained.

* The Originull Wasteland from ''VideoGame/KirbyAndTheForgottenLand'' is a desert that once was and oceanic area that dried out with time, and is as such littered with derelict ships.

[[folder:Film]]
* There's a brief shot in the Special Edition of ''Film/CloseEncountersOfTheThirdKind'' which shows the wreck of the Cotopaxi, a ship that disappeared in the BermudaTriangle, in the Gobi Desert. [[note]]The wreck site of the real Cotopaxi was identified in 2020, by the way. Strangely, it was off the coast of Florida, near where the ship disappeared, rather than in the middle of Mongolia.[[/note]]
* In ''Film/{{Holes}}'', a plot-important wrecked rowboat sits in the middle of the dried-up lake.
* Near the beginning of ''Film/TankGirl'', a ship is seen on a dried harbor bottom.

* There's an infamous wreckage of a ship in the salty, dried-up lakebed known as Shimmering Flats in ''VideoGame/WorldOfWarcraft''. After much WildMassGuessing to its origins, the location is one of several obvious choices to be ''re''flooded in the new expansion.

* Highway 17 in ''VideoGame/HalfLife2'' is peppered with these, as well as other places (like canals rendered so shallow only an airboat can get through) which feature beached craft quite prominently. WordOfGod is that the Combine have been harvesting water from the earths oceans, lowering the water level substantially. The [[VideoGame/{{Portal}} Aperture Science Labs]] research vessel ''Borealis'' is slated to appear in Episode 3 ([[VaporWare whenever it finally comes out]]). It disappeared from its dry dock one night, [[PortalCut as did large parts of its dry dock]]; teaser art shows it [[spoiler:lodged in an ice canyon who-knows-where]].

* One is featured during a mission in ''VideoGame/JustCause 2''. It's a very large tanker in a desert that is very high above sea-level. No explanation is given at all, although [[BilingualBonus the name of the place means "formerly a sea" in Indonesian]].

There's something [[{{tragedy}} tragic]] about a beached ship; not only is it "dead", but it's died on land rather than in the ocean and been denied a sailor's burial. You can imagine the surprise then, when our intrepid heroes run into a ship ''in the middle of the desert.''

* Highway 17 in ''VideoGame/HalfLife2'' is peppered with these, as well as other places (like canals rendered so shallow only an airboat can get through) which feature beached craft quite prominently. WordOfGod is that the Combine have been harvesting water from the earths oceans, lowering the water level substantially.
** The [[VideoGame/{{Portal}} Aperture Science Labs]] research vessel ''Borealis'' is slated to appear in Episode 3 ([[VaporWare whenever it finally comes out]]). It disappeared from its dry dock one night, [[PortalCut as did large parts of its dry dock]]; teaser art shows it [[spoiler:lodged in an ice canyon who-knows-where]].

** ''VideoGame/DonkeyKongCountryReturns'' features a shipwreck at the top of a cliff.
** An argument could be made for the ship mast seen in TheLostWoods world of ''VideoGame/DonkeyKongCountry2DiddysKongQuest'', although it may just be there as a "spiritual resting place" for the [[PaletteSwap ghost version]] of the boss you fought earlier.
** Also in ''2'', a wrecked ship is located in Crocodile Cauldron, the second world and a [[LethalLavaLand volcano]]. The ship itself is in a small lake of superheated water. The third world with the [[BubblegloopSwamp swamp theme]] has also a semi sunken ship in it. Given that the overall theme of this game is {{Pirates}}, there could have been even more of these in the other worlds...

* There are three rusted barge wrecks in ''VideoGame/{{STALKER}}: Call of Pripyat''. The Skadovsk is the one in best condition, and is used as a permanent hangout for Loners. The Shevchenko is more deteriorated, and is only used as a shelter by random stalker groups for a while before they move on. The last one, the Old Barge, is the home of a stalker called Noah.

** An argument could be made for the ship mast seen in the LostWoods world of ''VideoGame/DonkeyKongCountry2DiddysKongQuest'', although it may just be there as a "spiritual resting place" for the [[PaletteSwap ghost version]] of the boss you fought earlier.