The ghost fleet of Chuuk Lagoon: World’s biggest ship graveyard lies at site of WW2 battle where US crushed Japanese fleet
It is indeed ‘Chuuk’, formerly known as ‘Truk’ Lagoon. Lots of good photographs with decent captions.
I first learned about Truk/Chuuk Lagoon way back during the days of Jacques Cousteau, when they did an episode on the place. I think I remember seeing the car/truck in that one, and maybe the tank as well. Also the human remains. Obviously, some of the latter have been messed with, unless several of the sailors just happened to die with their heads all lined up together so it’s not an entirely pristine site. I wonder how much of the ordnance is still realistically live and how often any of it goes off.
Which it really is: Sonar to give best view yet of Civil War shipwreck
The world will soon get its first good look at the wreckage of the only U.S. Navy ship sunk in combat in the Gulf of Mexico during the Civil War, thanks to sophisticated 3-D sonar images that divers have been collecting this week in the Gulf’s murky depths.
The USS Hatteras, an iron-hulled 210-foot-long ship that sunk about 20 miles off the coast of Galveston, Texas, in January 1863, has sat mostly undisturbed and unnoticed since its wreckage was found in the early 1970s. But recent storm-caused shifts in the seabed where the Hatteras rests 57 feet below the surface have exposed more of it to inspection, and researchers are rushing to get as complete an image of the ship as possible before the sand and silt shifts back.
That’s actually quite a good article because it gives the story of the sinking. Wish it had images though.
UPDATE: No photos but this one has a rendering of the battle.
In France: French archaeologists explore a Roman shipwreck in the Antique port of Antibes
In the last area explored by the Inrap archaeologists, the wreck of a Roman vessel was discovered. The boat, preserved over more than 15 m in length, is lying on its side in a shallow area (less than 1.6 m under the Antique sea level). In the context of a partnership with the Centre Camille Jullian, Inrap and a CNRS naval archaeology specialist are collaborating in the analysis and interpretation of this discovery. The remains consist of a keel and several boards that covered the hull, held together by thousands of pegs inserted into sheave slots cut into the thickness of the boards. Around forty transverse ribs are present, some of which were attached to the keel with metallic pins.
Bit of background on the port as well.
UPDATE: More here.
Shipwreck to be freeze-dried, rebuilt
Like La Salle in 1685, researchers at Texas A&M are in uncharted waters as they try to reconstruct his vessel with a gigantic freeze-dryer, the first undertaking of its size.
By placing the ship — La Belle — in a constant environment of up to 60 degrees below zero, more than 300 years of moisture will be safely removed from hundreds of European oak and pine timbers and planks. The freeze-dryer, located at the old Bryan Air Force base several miles northwest of College Station, is 40 feet long and 8 feet wide — the biggest such machine on the continent devoted to archaeology.
I was trying to figure out how that would work when the lightbulb went off: Like the way ice cubes sublimate away in the freezer. Interestingly, it’s special-purpose built for archaeology.
Hunting undersea battlefields
After Convoy KS-520 swung around Cape Hatteras on July 15, 1942, a German sub stalking it fired four torpedoes. They hit three merchant ships, sinking a tanker and damaging two others. When the sub surfaced, two U.S. aircraft and gunfire from an escort sank it. A Navy tug sent to tow the damaged ships sank when it hit a mine in a defensive U.S. minefield.
Today, the ship, Bluefields, a Nicaraguan tanker, and the sub, U-576, repose on the seabed. Their exact location isn’t known. Both shipwrecks are the focus of a research project, now in its fifth year, to locate and document with photos and videos ships that sank off North Carolina during the war.
I hadn’t realized that so many were sunk right near US shores. . . .
UPDATE: Semi-related.
Researchers move from Minnetonka to other lakes to scan for wrecks
Two researchers who scrutinized the bottom of Lake Minnetonka for possible shipwrecks are turning their underwater sights on Lake Waconia in Carver County and White Bear Lake in Ramsey County.
Ann Merriman and her husband, Chris Olson, are archaeologists who together founded the nonprofit Maritime Heritage Minnesota in 2005. Their quest is history, not treasure, since the steamboats, barges, sailboats and other objects they’ve identified were usually stripped of anything valuable and intentionally sunk when they became outdated.
The couple use inexpensive but high-quality sonar equipment to scan the bottom of lakes and rivers methodically, searching for possible archaeological sites.
Generally of only local historical interest, but it shows what fairly simple projects can accomplish. Of course, they haven’t done any actual diving yet to verify any of the finds. . . . .
For a change: Ancient Roman shipwrecks found off Greek island
Two Roman-era shipwrecks have been found in deep water off a western Greek island, challenging the conventional theory that ancient shipmasters stuck to coastal routes rather than risking the open sea, an official said Tuesday.
Greece’s culture ministry said the two third-century wrecks were discovered earlier this month during a survey of an area where a Greek-Italian gas pipeline is to be sunk. They lay between 1.2 and 1.4 kilometers (0.7-0.9 miles) deep in the sea between Corfu and Italy.
That would place them among the deepest known ancient wrecks in the Mediterranean, apart from remains found in 1999 of an older vessel some 3 kilometers (1.8 miles) deep off Cyprus.
Another archaeologist is quoted in the story as saying that these finds may force a reevaluation of the coast-only idea. I was going to ponder whether that idea got started because the ships were only found in shallow water, which could be indicating the ease of finding them in shallow water rather than their actual absence in deep water. But maybe that’s still the case, if the ships like this are difficult to find in deep water in the first place.
Maybe: Warren whaling ship wreck found in Argentina?
A shipwreck that lies half buried in the muck and sand of an Argentinian bay could be the last remains of a whaling vessel that was built in and sailed out of Warren during the waning years of American whaling.
Marine archaeologists from Argentina’s National Institute of Anthropology believe they may have found the remains of the Dolphin, a 110-foot whaling bark built in 1850 by Chace and Davis, a shipbuilding firm in operation between Company and Sisson streets for much of the 19th century.
Neat story. Doesn’t indicate that. . . .well, what’s weird is that it’s so near shore and wasn’t identified all these years. One would have thought it could have been salvaged easily and no mystery about it at all. Hmmm.
Very cool: 200-year-old shipwreck found in Gulf of Mexico
An oil company exploration crew’s chance discovery of a 200-year-old shipwreck in a little-charted stretch of the Gulf of Mexico is yielding a trove of new information to scientists who say it’s one of the most well-preserved old wrecks ever found in the Gulf.
“When we saw it we were all just astonished because it was beautifully preserved, and by that I mean for a 200-year-old shipwreck,” said Jack Irion, maritime archaeologist with the Department of the Interior’s Bureau of Ocean Energy Management in New Orleans.
Video shows muskets and gin bottles littering the Gulf bottom, along with sea life mingling in the wreck.
Few photos at the link, pretty good quality. Apparently some of the bottles still (should) have their contents intact. Nothing brought up so far yet.
Preferably in the Bahamas or the eastern Mediterranean: How to Uncover Underwater Artifacts
Five-gallon buckets are so very useful. Little did I think we would use them to explore ancient Maya offerings underwater. While dive gear consists of high technology like trimix gases and the underwater camera, archaeology gear consists of low technology, like the bucket and shovel. During excavations, archaeologists usually fill the buckets with dirt, which is then sifted through half-inch or quarter-inch mesh screens for artifacts. But here, Chip would be using the buckets underwater — at a depth of nearly 200 feet.
The plan was to begin excavations downslope from the ceremonial building on the southwest edge of Pool 1, where we think anything the Maya threw in would roll down. But first we had to find empty pigtail buckets at the local gas station. John Carr at the Banana Bank Lodge offered us the use of a broken shovel. Now we were ready to go.
Sadly, rather uninformative, including the video.
