Diving experts inspected the underside of the Ever Given, which blocked the Suez Canal for days this month, interrupting global trade, and say they found slight damage on the bow.
Officials made the discovery on Wednesday, according to The Associated Press, though the damage was not deemed severe enough to have caused the ship to be grounded.
An investigation into what caused the Ever Given to become stuck is ongoing. The large container ship is currently anchored in Great Bitter Lake after a week of being stuck in the canal and cutting off a vital trade route.
The ship was successfully freed from the canal on Monday by the Dutch dredging company Boskalis, which dug and removed about 30,000 cubic meters of sand from around it.
Once the cause of the grounding is discovered, experts predict that years of litigation will ensue, the AP reported. The cargo ship is owned by a Japanese firm and operated by a Taiwanese shipper. It is also flagged in Panama and currently stuck in Egypt, which could cause legal complications.
Jamil Jaffer, founder and executive director of the National Security Institute at George Mason University, on Monday noted that the Ever Given event appeared to be caused by human error and that such an incident could have been taken advantage of to cause disruption.
“All you need is control of one ship. You don’t have to blow anything up; you don’t have to kill anybody, and you can still have a huge impact on world commerce very quickly,” he said at the time.