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 opposition when it comes to finding shipwrecks, with treasure hunters interested in looting and archaeologists in preserving and studying. That, too, may be changing: Odyssey says it will follow proper archaeological procedures in its work on the Republic. Its founder, Greg Stemm, wants to prove there can be a compromise between recovering treasure and archaeological study. After all, as he likes to point out, without the prospect of treasure, most shipwreck-hunting expeditions would never leave dry land, and there’d be nothing for the archaeologists to study.
Finding shipwrecks is expensive because it’s not easy, even with new technology. Odyssey has been looking for the Republic for 12 years, and searched roughly 3,000 square kilometres of the Atlantic sea bottom before finding the wreck in 500 metres of water about 160 kilometres southeast of Savannah.
Nevertheless, technology has been a great boon to shipwreck-hunters, and keeps improving all the time. One advance, side-scan sonar, sends sound pulses sideways–horizontally–along the ocean floor. A computer can, under ideal conditions, create almost photo-like images of shipwrecks from the returning echoes.
Hyper-sensitive magnetometers can detect any sizable chunk of iron lying on the ocean floor. (Obviously, this is of less use in discovering ancient wooden ships than those of more recent vintage.)
Remotely Operated Vehicles, or ROVs, like the famous JASON, used in the exploration of the Titanic wreck and many times since, can return not only video and photographs of deep-water wrecks, but even artifacts. Odyssey will be using a ROV called ZEUS on the Republic; its force-feedback manipulators give the operator on the surface a sense that he is actually touching objects on the ocean floor.
ROVs may soon give way to Autonomous Underwater Vehicles. These are much like ROVs but have one huge advantage: no cables connect them to a surface ship. They can stay underwater for two days at a time. They can carry side-scan sonar and magnetometers far deeper than cabled instruments currently penetrate, providing clearer data. They’re invulnerable to bad weather, unconcerned by the tossing of the surface ship, and they’re not subject to embarrassments like tangled cables.
An AUV was recently used to discover and survey the wreck of a Second World War German U-Boat, sunk in 1,500 metres of water about 70 kilometres south of the mouth of the Mississippi River on July 30, 1942, shortly after it sank the American passenger freighter Robert E. Lee. The discovery rewrote history, proving the U-Boat was sunk by a U.S. warship right after its attack on the passenger freighter, instead of by a Coast Guard airplane several days later, as had previously been thought. The wreck would have gone unnoticed by instruments cabled to a surface ship.
Dr. Robert Ballard, discoverer of the Titanic wreck, recently concluded an expedition to the Black Sea and eastern Mediterranean, studying ancient shipwrecks there. He used the expedition to test an early version of what he sees as the future of underwater archaeology.
Dr. Ballard feels that new telecommunication advances, including commercially available satellites, inexpensive stabilized antennas that allow ships to maintain contact with satellites even while rolling up to 15 degrees, fiber-optics, high definition video, and the ultra-high-speed Internet II, used by academic institutions, will allow scientists (and others) to have real-time access to research and exploration activities around the world for a fraction of the cost of actually traveling to the research site.
During his expedition, a ROV exploring the wrecks was connected by fiber-optic cables to a surface ship which, in turn, transmitted the data via satellite to a land-based receiving site, which placed it on the Internet II distribution network (and a portion of it on the public Internet, so anyone who wanted could watch live pictures from the bottom of the sea).
Shipwrecks provide fascinating snapshots of the past. As technology makes it easier to find and explore these relics of history, we should gain a clearer understanding of how and why, for thousands of years, humans have risked the dangers of the deep.
