This story originally appeared on Atlas Obscura and is part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

On a choppy voyage to Antarctica in 1928, the crew of the ship that would eventually be rechristened as the Vamar bestowed upon their vessel an optimistic nickname: “Evermore Rolling.” It proved to be a bit of a misnomer. Far from slicing through cresting waves forever, the ship sank near Florida in 1942, 3.7 miles from the shore of Mexico Beach, possibly because it was loaded down with too much lumber.

It was wrecked, true, but its story didn’t end there. In 2004, the shipwreck was designated as one of Florida’s Underwater Archaeological Preserves; it was added to the National Register of Historic Places two years later. Now, the sepia, green, and gold waters around it are full of life. Fish dart through the ruins of the mangled iron broiler, and plants shoot up through the piecemeal hull and beams. Sea turtles scratch their shells against iron bars splayed out just above the sandy seabed, leaving burnt-orange rust behind them. Divers drop by to take it all in.

Shipwrecks aren’t necessarily barren, static things, vanished and abandoned to the deep water and the recesses of someone’s foggy memory. They may be moldering, but, like the Vamar, they’re often active places—part cultural heritage site, part dynamic ecosystem. They’re constantly in flux, and they’ll be impacted as climate change affects the water that holds them.

Some wrecks lay flush against the sand. NOAA/ CC BY 2.0

For years, archaeologists have mainly been concerned with what climate change might do to places where the land meets the water. They’ve examined ways to stave off rising tides by buffering sites that will be swamped, hauling things to higher ground, or documenting whatever they can in the water’s path. For these sites that are not yet damp, water is a threat—sometimes a distant one, sometimes one that’s gaining ground—but for the wrecks, it’s a foregone conclusion. That ship has sailed—and sunk.

With climate change, “sea-level rise is the most obvious thing people are used to hearing about, and the most easily dismissed with submerged sites,” says Jeneva Wright, an underwater archaeologist and research fellow at East Carolina University. Sea-level rise is far from the only climate-related threat facing submerged sites, though: Wright outlined a handful of others in a 2016 paper in the Journal of Maritime Archaeology, written when she was working as an archaeologist in the National Parks Services’ Submerged Resources Center.