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Earlier this month, a company called
Odyssey Marine Explorations Inc. announced that it has discovered the sunken wreck of the S.S. Republic, a steamer that went down in a hurricane off Savannah, Georgia, on October 25, 1865, carrying $400,000 in $20 gold coins--worth $120 to $180 million today.
There was a time when sending a ship to Davy Jones’s Locker was thought permanent. These days, though, thanks to technological advances, Davy Jones’s Locker doesn’t seem all that well locked.
That’s got a lot of would-be treasure hunters and archaeologists alike very excited: by UNESCO’s estimate, there are three million sunken ships scattered around the world’s oceans.
Traditionally, treasure hunters and archaeologists have been in ...
Posted by Edward Willett at 16:19, August 26th, 2003 under Blog, Columns, Science Columns |
They say that a movie is only as good as its villain, and the new movie Titanic, now packing people into theatres all over the world, has a whopper: a giant block of ice that tears open the "unsinkable" ship's hull and, a couple of hours later, send it to the bottom.
Icebergs have bedevilled ships in the North Atlantic since the earliest crossings. You might say they automatically have right of way: they don't move for nobody, not even the mightiest passenger liner ever to set sail. But you can hardly blame them for that: after all, the iceberg that the Titanic hit, like every other iceberg in the ocean, began forming thousands of years ...
Posted by Edward Willett at 5:22, January 26th, 1998 under Blog, Columns, Science Columns |