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4[[quoteright:350:[[VideoGame/PokemonXDGaleOfDarkness https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/ss_libra_wreck.png]]]]
5[[caption-width-right:350:"The plan is perfect", [[CuteButPsycho she]] said. "It was off by just a tiny bit", [[MadScientist she]] said. ''Look what "just a tiny bit off" did!'']]
6%%
7There's something {{trag|edy}}ic 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.''
8
9Somehow this ship has been wrecked on land and far from water. If it isn't just there to look ominous and creepy like a RibcageRidge, then it will very likely hold important supplies, clues or shelter from the desert environment for the heroes.
10
11The fact that the ship has run aground can mean a lot of things about the desert or setting. Mundane explanations include [[GaiasLament receding shorelines due to climate change]] or a typhoon/tropical storm/tornado. Weirder possibilities include but aren't limited to: a TeleporterAccident, TheEndOfTheWorldAsWeKnowIt having come [[AfterTheEnd and gone]], the captain being [[EpicFail that bad of a navigator]], the place where all the stuff the NegativeSpaceWedgie sucks up gets dumped, or any of a hundred other possibilities. They may end up becoming BoatsIntoBuildings.
12
13While [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wadi_Al-Hitan parts of the Sahara actually were once part of the Mediterranean Sea,]] this was well before ships (or even humans) existed and thus a literal Saharan shipwreck is exceedingly unlikely.
14
15A subtrope of EerilyOutOfPlaceObject.
16
17----
18!!Examples:
19[[foldercontrol]]
20
21[[folder:Anime and Manga]]
22* Featured in several episodes of ''Anime/TheBigO''.
23* Second act of ''Anime/DigimonAdventure'' had the cast encounter one run by Cockatrimon. [[SandIsWater It actually functions]], at least until it sails at full steam into [[AllDesertsHaveCacti a gigantic cactus]] and gets flung away.
24* One of the earlier establishing shots at the beginning of ''Anime/FistOfTheNorthStar'' is of an oil tanker ''embedded in a skyscraper''. A definite sign that you're going to see some serious shit.
25* From ''Anime/SpaceBattleshipYamato'':
26-->...humanity refits the wreck of the World War II battleship ''Yamato'', lying at rest on the exposed surface where the ocean used to be, into a space battleship...
27[[/folder]]
28
29[[folder:Comic Books]]
30* In the ''ComicBook/BuffyTheVampireSlayer'' season 8 comics, Willow manages to teleport a ship on the Himalayan mountains. Granted, it's not as dry as the Sahara, but it's probably the farthest you can go from the sea.
31* [[ComicBook/DisneyDucksComicUniverse Scrooge McDuck]] and his nephews took shelter in a Spanish Galleon lost in a South American desert after being left for dead by the Beagle boys, while both were trying to find the Seven Cities of Cibola.
32* ''ComicBook/JustAPilgrim'': [[AfterTheEnd after the sun grows in size and dries up all the world's oceans]], one battle takes place in the now dry wreckage of the Titanic.
33* In one ''ComicBook/GrooTheWanderer'' comic, Captain Ajax manages to keep Groo (the walking disaster area) from sinking his ship multiple times...at least until Groo accidentally releases the flood gates of the artificial lake the ship was on, ''sinking the lake instead!''
34-->'''Ajax:''' I don't know how he did it, but I know HE did it!
35[[/folder]]
36
37[[folder:Films -- Animated]]
38* ''WesternAnimation/WallE'': There are a few of these on post-apocalyptic Earth. EVE blows up a couple when she gets angry.
39[[/folder]]
40
41[[folder:Films -- Live-Action]]
42* 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.
43* 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]]
44* 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.
45* The 1995 live-action ''Film/FistOfTheNorthStar'' film has a submarine sitting in a middle of a wasteland.
46* 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.
47* ''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]].
48* 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''.
49* In ''Film/{{Holes}}'', a plot-important wrecked rowboat sits in the middle of the dried-up lake.
50* A Viking ship in ''Film/LandOfTheLost''.
51* 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]]
52* ''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]].
53* ''Franchise/PiratesOfTheCaribbean'':
54** Used symbolically in ''Film/PiratesOfTheCaribbeanAtWorldsEnd'', where Jack Sparrow's version of IronicHell has him attempting to pull the ''Black Pearl'' across an endless salt flat; as a pirate the worst place for him to be is in the middle of a desert. Not that this minor setback stops him--with a bit of help from the witch Tia Dalma, the ''Pearl'' is sailed overland until it reaches the spectral ocean at World's End.
55** Occurs also in ''Film/PiratesOfTheCaribbeanOnStrangerTides'' with a Spanish ship on a cliff. In a jungle. To be fair, the actual coastline seems not too far away.
56* The plot of ''Film/{{Sahara 2005}}'' involves a literal shipwreck in the Sahara which is supposed to be loaded with Confederate gold coins from UsefulNotes/TheAmericanCivilWar.
57* Near the beginning of ''Film/TankGirl'', a ship is seen on a dried harbor bottom.
58* 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.
59* ''Film/ZackSnydersJusticeLeague''. In Batman's BadFuture vision of an Earth conquered by Darkseid, a supercarrier and a crashed airliner can be seen in a [[OmnicidalManiac world that's been turned to desert]] by the GalacticConqueror.
60[[/folder]]
61
62[[folder:Folklore]]
63* [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lost_Ship_of_the_Desert Lost Ship of the Desert]] of the American folklore.
64[[/folder]]
65
66[[folder:Literature]]
67* In ''Literature/OneHundredYearsOfSolitude'' the discovery of a wrecked ship is the exploration party's sign that they are nearing the sea, causing them to give up hope of reaching civilization.
68* ''Literature/WolfInShadow'' by Creator/DavidGemmell has the BigBad headquartered in the Titanic, exposed when the Earth shifted on its axis, moving all of the oceans.
69* The plot of ''Literature/{{Sahara}}'' by Creator/CliveCussler involves a literal shipwreck in the Saharah--a ''Confederate Ironclad''. Really. What's more, its ''cargo'' is the most surprising thing. [[spoiler: It's the corpse of Abraham Lincoln. The one shot at Ford's theater was an unwitting double. Also, shitloads of Confederate gold.]]
70* Played with in Andre Norton's ''Quag Keep.'' Whilst traversing the Sea of Dust, the heroes discover a slightly-buried ship. However, it had been specially designed to travel through the dust.
71** Norton's ''No Night Without Stars'' features the nearly-intact remains of a submarine in a dried-out ocean basin, hundreds of years AfterTheEnd.
72* ''Literature/{{Holes}}''. is set at Camp Green Lake, which has been dry for more than a century. A small two-person rowboat can be found several miles from the camp. It provides shade from the brutal sun, as well as some jars containing moldy peaches, which are later used to carry water. [[spoiler:Zero hides there after running away from the camp]].
73* In Creator/JohnChristopher's CosyCatastrophe ''A Wrinkle in the Skin''; massive earthquakes redistribute the balance of ocean and land, and the protagonist comes across a large tanker sitting in the desert which used to be the seabed.
74* ''Literature/StarTrekDestiny'' begins with Earth's second starship, the NX-02 ''Columbia'', [[http://images.wikia.com/startrek/images/f/f7/Columbia_in_desert.jpg being found on the surface of a remote desert planet]].
75* Chris van Allsburg's ''The Wreck of the Zephyr'' revolves around a wrecked sailboat found on a cliff top and the legend of how it got there.
76* In Creator/MichaelMoorcock's ''Elric'' saga, Elric is given the use of the Ship That Sails Over Land And Sea by the friendly King of the Water Elementals. Unfortunately, while sailing it over land, the King of the Earth Elementals gets tetchy over an artifact rightly belonging on water intruding on his domain, and arbitrarily removes its power to sail over land, leaving ship and crew stranded.
77* In the backstory of ''Literature/TheWheelOfTime'' when all male wizards went mad, they started destroying everything around them, drastically reshaping the continents. At one point a ruined city is described, in the mountains thousands of miles inland. A 30-something-century old wizard recalls that this used to be a sea port before the Breaking.
78* In Creator/MargaretWeis and Creator/TracyHickman's original ''Literature/{{Dragonlance}}'' trilogy, the heroes at one point travel to Tarsis, a large port city, in order to find a ship. It turns out they were working from a rather old map, and the Cataclysm a couple of centuries previously had made some fairly drastic changes to the geography. There isn't just one Saharan shipwreck, but a whole port full of them.
79* Noah's Ark is said in ''Literature/TheBible'' to have come to rest atop the Mountains of Ararat (which is presumed to include Mount Ararat in modern-day Turkey, but nobody knows for sure) after the Great Flood receded.
80* ''Presumed Dead'' by Australian author Rick Kennett, has his recurring character Cy De Gerch coming across a fleet of such ships on an alien world.
81* In the Creator/OgdenNash poem "I Can Hardly Wait For the Sandman", he describes a dream in which he was walking through a desert when he came across one of the ''Mary Celeste'''s lifeboats. And if he hadn't woken up at that point, he'd probably have solved the [[StockUnsolvedMysteries mystery of what happened to her]].
82* In ''A Wrinkle in the Skin'' by Creator/JohnChristopher, massive earthquakes have reshaped the world. The protagonists are crossing a dried-up English Channel and come across a stranded oil tanker.
83[[/folder]]
84
85[[folder:Live-Action TV]]
86* ''Series/DoctorWho'':
87** [[Recap/DoctorWhoS30E15PlanetOfTheDead "Planet of the Dead"]]: A red London bus in the middle of an endless desert. (It came through a wormhole.)
88** [[Recap/DoctorWhoS36E7ThePyramidAtTheEndOfTheWorld "The Pyramid at the End of the World"]]: Courtesy of the antagonists, a USAF bomber and a Russian submarine sitting undamaged on the ground outside the titular pyramid, in the middle of Central Asia.
89* The opening credits of ''Series/FatherTed'' show a stranded ship, some way inland, ostensibly somewhere on Craggy Island, with no clue as to how it got there. The real ship, the ''MV Plassey'', was washed ashore on Inisheer (off the West Coast) after a bit of what locals call "soft weather" in 1960... Indeed, it has moved again once or twice over the decades, when storms are heavy enough.
90* The Black Rock in ''Series/{{Lost}}'', the wreck of a 19th century sailing ship decaying in the middle of a jungle. Bonus points for explaining how it got there in season 1, and then showing the actual event in season 6.
91* In [[Recap/MonarchLegacyOfMonstersS1E2Departure episode 2]] of ''Series/MonarchLegacyOfMonsters'', the wreckage of the USS ''Lawton'', a WWII destroyer ship which was mentioned in ''Film/KongSkullIsland'' as having been destroyed at sea by a Titan, is found by its SoleSurvivor and two other people nestled in an inland jungle clearing in the Philippines. This discovery leads them to discover the existence of Titans when the Ion Dragon which has been roosting inside the ship attacks them.
92* Season 3 of ''Series/SeaQuestDSV'' began with the titular submarine being found in the middle of an Iowa cornfield. Aliens did it.
93[[/folder]]
94
95[[folder:Music]]
96* [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pFTRy2yEDn0 Evergreen]] by Yoann Lemoine has a lone deer exploring a dead, dry world implied to have suffered an ecological catastrophe. He finds a decrepit tanker ship in the middle of the wasteland, sheltering a lone living plant. Spiritually becomes an aversion, [[spoiler: when the deer takes the plant's seed to water and it creates a sea of grass for the ship to sail on.]]
97[[/folder]]
98
99[[folder:TabletopGames]]
100* The 3E ''TabletopGame/{{Ravenloft}}'' products introduced "Mistways" to the setting, as semi-reliable paths between realms. One of them leads from the Core's Nocturnal Sea directly to the deserts of Har'Akir, invoking this trope on any ship that traverses it.
101* As noted in ''Literature'', the ''Literature/{{Dragonlance}}'' setting features quite a few of these due to changes in geography after the Cataclysm.
102[[/folder]]
103
104[[folder:VideoGames]]
105* ''VideoGame/CuriousExpedition'': One of the things you might find on an expedition is a mysterious wrecked ship, found miles inland. You can usually scavenge them for supplies or even valuables.
106* Spaceship example: In ''VideoGame/{{The Dig|1995}}'', 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.
107* Another spacecraft buried beneath the sands of a desert is what kick-starts the plot of the first ''VideoGame/{{Homeworld}}'' game.
108** 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.
109* ''VideoGame/JurassicTheHunted'': the first turret section in the game takes place next to a beached ship in the middle of a forest. There's also a German U-boat in a cave. These are justified by time travel shenanigans and wormholes.
110* ''Franchise/TheLegendOfZelda'':
111** ''[[VideoGame/TheLegendOfZeldaOracleGames The Legend of Zelda: Oracle of Seasons]]'' involves a pirate crew that somehow shipwrecked into a desert. Apparently, they beached themselves so hard that the front end of the ship ''punched through the ground'' and now sticks out in ''Subrosia''.
112** ''VideoGame/TheLegendOfZeldaSkywardSword'' gives us the Sandship, which used to be a seafaring vessel until the seas dried out and filled with sand. At least, until you activate the Timeshift Stone on board, restoring both the ship and the ocean around it to their former glory.
113* ''VideoGame/MarioAndLuigi'':
114** Happens in the original ''VideoGame/MarioAndLuigiSuperstarSaga'' with the pirate ship in the middle of Teehee Valley. The brothers manage to get the ship moving again when the cork holding the water back is removed and the ship sails on the open seas once again. This is short lived since the ship quickly crashes into a big rock and sinks to the bottom of the ocean.
115** There's also the remains of a ship somehow in a cave, early in ''VideoGame/MarioAndLuigiBowsersInsideStory''.
116* ''VideoGame/PokemonXDGaleOfDarkness'' has the S.S. ''Libra''. In this case, you actually see how it got there in the beginning of the game: it was dropped there by Shadow Lugia. Unlike most of the examples, the ''Libra'' was dumped in the Eclo Wastes far more recently than most ships described by this trope, and aside from Cipher and Snagem interlopers, there's only one local on board. Cipher looted the Pokémon on the ship during their attack, and the human sailors were thrown overboard. Your visit to the ''Libra'' is the first time anyone could get a good glimpse of what happened to it.
117* There's an infamous wreckage of a ship in the salty, dried-up lakebed known as the Shimmering Flats in ''VideoGame/WorldOfWarcraft''. After much WildMassGuessing to its origins, it became the Shimmering Deep when the entire zone was re-flooded in ''[[ExpansionPack Cataclysm]]''.
118* The party actually uses one of these as their main transportation in ''VideoGame/DragonQuestVIII'', after using magic to get it back to sea. Strangely for a fantastic setting, its pretty clearly stated to be a receding coastline issue--they get it back to sea by using magic to "get the area to remember when there was ocean there."
119* In ''VideoGame/{{Crysis}}'', a frozen ship is found on a mountain. [[spoiler:Aliens put it there. Sort of.]]
120* 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 earth's 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]].
121* The mission "Sangre del Toro" in ''VideoGame/BattlefieldBadCompany 2'''s story mode revolves around B-Company's search for one of these (the eponymous ''Sangre del Toro'') in the middle of Chile's Atacama Desert.
122* One is featured during a mission in ''VideoGame/JustCause2''. It's a very large tanker in a desert that is very high above sea-level. No explanation is given; although the name of the place, Lautan Lama, [[BilingualBonus means "formerly a sea" in Indonesian]], the buildings and temples in the desert [[AnachronismStew look much older than the ship]].
123* A beached ship acts as one end of the arena in one of the settings for the post-apocalyptic FightingGame ''VideoGame/PrimalRage''.
124* ''VideoGame/DonkeyKongCountry''
125** ''VideoGame/DonkeyKongCountry2DiddysKongQuest'': 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.
126** ''VideoGame/DonkeyKongCountryReturns'' features a shipwreck at the top of a cliff in World 6, which is themed around {{Prehistoria}}.
127* ''VideoGame/DigitalDevilSaga'' has a cruise ship in a desert, there's no bodies of water in the Junkyard ''period'', and only it started to rain during the game's events. Many characters had expressed confusion about it, including the fact they even knew what a ship was - more evidence that the Junkyard wasn't what it seemed.
128* ''VideoGame/{{Fallout}}'':
129** Various small ships in ''VideoGame/Fallout3'' show that the water level has gone down significantly in the last 200 years.
130** In ''VideoGame/Fallout4'', the USS Constitution can be found beached on top of two buildings, resulting from a failed attempt to fly it with rocket engines. There's also the FMS Northern Star, a stranded freighter populated by Norwegian-speaking ghouls.
131* Frequently seen in ''Far: Lone Sails'', the desert the protagonist is riding through was obviously a dried up ocean, in the end they finally make it to the coastline and, it's implied, are rescued by a ship.
132* The original ''VideoGame/{{Syberia}}'' featured a few rusty ships in the middle of the desert that is strongly implied to have been the Aral Sea once (the town of Aralbad is fictional but [[ExactlyWhatItSaysOnTheTin its location is obvious]]).
133* The Crystal Desert of ''VideoGame/GuildWars: Prophecies'' contains several derelict Margonite ships from a time when the area was still known as the Crystal Sea.
134* Early on in ''VideoGame/UnchartedDrakesFortune'', Drake and Sully stumble upon an abandoned Nazi U-Boat stuck miles upriver in the middle of the jungle. Sully's explanation that it floated up there then got stuck isn't ''entirely'' implausible but still quite unlikely.[[note]]Which fits, because ''Uncharted'' runs on "plausible but unlikely."[[/note]]
135-->'''Sully:''' I don't know, Nate. Something about this seems kind of... hinky.\
136'''Nate:''' Hinky. [[HaventYouSeenXBefore You act like you've never seen a German U-Boat in the middle of the jungle before]].
137* The level "The Storm" in ''VideoGame/{{Halo 3}}'' is set at an abandoned harbor on a lake drained by the Covenant during their excavation of the Ark portal.
138* The entirety of the second act in ''VideoGame/TorchlightII'' is set in the Ossean Wastes, a vast desert full of shipwrecks stated to once have been a sea before.
139* ''Videogame/DiabloIII'' has a wrecked ship called 'The Black Rock' that can be found in the deserts around Caldeum.
140* A couple of ''VideoGame/MechWarrior'' missions have taken place in areas that were formerly underwater. In ''2: Mercenaries'', it's possible to visit a world that used to be more temperate until its orbit somehow moved closer to its sun and most of the ocean boiled off; the campaign will eventually have you go into the now empty hull of a wrecked ocean liner in the middle of a desert. In ''3'', you'll enter an area that used to be a lake until it was drained--look around and you'll find stranded {{Sea Mine}}s (which of course will blow up if you shoot or step on them) and the wrecked hulls of several sunken ships in the dried out lake bed.
141* ''VideoGame/KultHereticKingdoms'': While not a desert, the city of Kyallisar is a long way from the coast, being built on a bunch of rocky outcroppings in a mountain pass. Some of its buildings, however, are obviously repurposed wooden ships.
142* The very beginning of the first stage of the first game of the ''VideoGame/MetalSlug'' franchise has the wreck of a submarine in what seems to be land with no sea on sight. Even more baffling is that [[AllThereInTheManual additional materials]] identify the wreck as the remains of the Middle-Son 1999 type submarine. This submarine was an upgraded version of the old Middle-Son 1989 type submarine, the one that appears halfway through the final mission of the game, and disappeared mysteriously during a voyage. What happened to it and how it ended in the middle of a jungle is a riddle for the ages.
143** One of the bosses in a later ''Metal Slug'' sequel is a submarine that inexplicably emerges from a desert.
144* ''VideoGame/MadMax2015'' 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.
145* Doable in the scenario editor of ''VideoGame/AgeOfEmpiresII''. There are two shipwreck units and they can be placed both on water and on land.
146* In the campaign of ''VideoGame/AgeOfEmpiresIII'', Amelia reaches the Lake of the Moon about 200 years after her ancestor, Morgan Black, and finds that it has been drained since. The bed is still littered by remains of galleons from the last battle between Morgan and the Circle, and the bad guys are mining them for gold.
147* ''VideoGame/MetroExodus'' has you visit the shores of the Caspian Sea, where the drying up and desertification of the sea has beached many ships, which have been turned into bases by local bandits.
148* ''VideoGame/MassEffectAndromeda:'' The desert moon of Elaaden has a gigantic crashed spaceship taking up a good chunk of the local area, much like the Star Destroyers in ''The Force Awakens'' (complete with locals trying to loot the damn thing). It's a bit bigger than the usual examples. Apparently, it's more than halfway buried in the sand, and it's ''still'' looming over everything around it.
149* The map "Ghost Town" from ''VideoGame/WorldOfTanks'' features two large, stranded tanker ships in the middle of a desert. Wily light tanks or brave tank destroyers can use these beached vessels as hard cover for an attack or to perform scouting missions. It is heavily implied that Ghost Town is located somewhere in the vicinity of the real-world Aral Sea as mentioned in the Real Life folder. A hidden EasterEgg includes a road sign which suggests the map is placed very near the real-world GhostTown of [[http://uzbek-travel.com/about-uzbekistan/places/muynak Muynak, Uzbekistan.]]
150* The Originull Wasteland from ''VideoGame/KirbyAndTheForgottenLand'' is a desert that once was an oceanic area that dried out with time, and is as such littered with derelict ships.
151* ''[[VideoGame/Ashes2063 Ashes Afterglow]]'' has a [[spoiler:Russian]] submarine beached in the middle of a swamp in the U.S. state of Atlanta. If you read the messages in a terminal midway through the game, you can find references on an incident where a submarine disappeared, and [[spoiler:if you have an encrypted disc found in the SecretLevel of the first hub and use said terminal to decypher it]], you can visit it yourself.
152* In ''VideoGame/{{Jusant}}'', There are ships of various sizes on the ground or hanging on the cliff-side, indicating that in the past there was an ocean washing the tower's shores.
153[[/folder]]
154
155[[folder:Visual Novels]]
156* ''VisualNovel/NineHoursNinePersonsNineDoors'' plays with this in an unusual way. During the first Nonary Game, an experiment designed to test and enhance the psychic abilities of children, the subjects were placed in two facilities - the ''Gigantic'' (a sister ship of the ''Titanic''), and a construct known as 'Building Q' in the middle of the Nevada desert, which was an identical replica of the ''Gigantic'' on the inside. As the real ''Gigantic'' was being deliberately sunk during the experiment, Building Q artificially simulated the sinking with tanks that would raise the water level throughout the building. Nine years later during the second Nonary Game, the abducted partitipants believed themselves to all be in the ''Gigantic'', only to learn in the finale that they were in the desert-located Building Q the entire time and were never in danger of the 'ship' sinking.
157
158[[/folder]]
159
160
161[[folder:Webcomics]]
162* ''Webcomic/{{Suihira}}'', on [[http://www.suihira.com/comics/2262070/3-ferus-page-8 this page,]] specifically.
163* ''Webcomic/CheshireCrossing'' contains one of the more spectacular examples, because we get to see ''how'' the ship got there, and it wasn't just teleported through space but ''into AnotherDimension''. And then it gets turned into a FlyingDutchman for good measure.
164[[/folder]]
165
166[[folder:Western Animation]]
167* Part 2 of the FiveEpisodePilot of ''WesternAnimation/DuckTales1987'' ("Wronguay in Ronguay") involved searching for a Spanish galleon in the middle of a desert. It had gotten there in the first place because of a torrential rainstorm that floods said desert every hundred years.
168* In ''WesternAnimation/FatherAndDaughter'', a father apparently commits SuicideBySea, hugging his daughter goodbye and then rowing into the ocean in a rowboat, never to be seen again. Eventually the shallow sea coast is drained and made into a Dutch polder. Decades later, when the little girl is now an old woman, she walks out onto the polder and finds her father's rowboat, half-buried in sand.
169* ''WesternAnimation/ThundarrTheBarbarian'': In the episode "Raiders of the Abyss" Thundarr visits a tribe that lives in the wreck of an ancient beached cruise ship. The chief of the tribe wears the old captain's hat and uniform as a sign of his authority.
170* ''WesternAnimation/ScoobyDooMysteryIncorporated'': In "Night on Haunted Mountain", an attack from [[MonsterOfTheWeek Dark Lilith]] leads the gang to the top of Mount Diabla, where they find the long-abandoned Santa Lucia, an old Spanish galleon that was used by the conquistadors, filled with [[DurableDeathtrap a variety of ancient traps]]. It is later revealed that [[spoiler: the ship was intentionally brought to the top of the mountain by the conquistadors, in order to hide a piece of the [[DismantledMacGuffin Planispheric Disk]]. The ship is subsequently dislodged from the mountain once the piece is retrieved, destroying both the ship and most of the nearby [[TrashyTrailerHome trailer park town]].]]
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173[[folder:Real Life]]
174* TruthInTelevision: The [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aral_Sea Aral Sea]] and [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lake_Chad Lake Chad]] were once ''much'' larger than they are now. The Aral has shrunk by about 90%, and Lake Chad by 95%. When the Aral dried up, it grounded a number of large steel-hulled ships on what is now both sand and grassland with no water visible in any direction. This is less prevalent in Lake Chad since even before its shrinkage it was an extremely shallow lake (no deeper than 11 meters/36 feet) despite having a surface area of over 10,000 square miles.
175** Aral used to be even smaller, until Kazakhstan dammed away the Lesser Aral and limited its water consumption (for irrigating the cotton fields), so it started slowly filling again. So maybe those hulks on the shores of Lesser Aral may finally return to their element someday. The Greater Aral on the other hand might never recover, as it's largely in Uzbekistan which just doesn't seem to care.
176* The Mediterranean Sea has [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Messinian_salinity_crisis dried up numerous times]] in its ancient history. Since it's already pretty deep, it would have necessarily exposed the lowest dry land on earth.
177* Salton Sea, after it was abandoned in the 60s, suffered some flooding but mostly receding shorelines, leaving many abandoned boats (probably already sunk on the bottom by the time they were dried out) marooned high and dry on cracked, parched earth far from water. The fact that the Salton Sea is artificial to begin with, having been created by an irrigation accident in the 1920s, helps explain this. Unfortunately the circumstances of its abandonment and subsequent drying out have also left the former Salton Sea highly toxic.
178* [[UrbanLegend According to legend]] this has happened in real life, if you believe the lost civilization types. There are supposed to be lost ships from Atlantis in the North African desert and in the Atlas Mountains, as well as a famous [[HornyVikings Viking longship]](!) in the deserts of the American southwest with [[SkeletonCrew skeletons still at the oars]].
179* It's entirely possible for particularly wild seas to carry vessels a long way inland; the tsunami that followed the famous eruption of Krakatoa dumped one ship several miles into the jungle, where it stayed until it finally disintegrated in the 20th century.
180* Many shipwrecks along Namibia's [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skeleton_Coast Skeleton Coast,]] such as the ''Eduard Bohlen'', are now a long distance from shore due to changes in the coastline over the years.
181* There is a legend about a Spanish Galleon stranded in the Mojave desert.
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