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From Hurriyet daily news

One of the world’s richest plate sets from the Eastern Roman Empire has been discovered off the coast of the southern province of Antalya’s Adrasan district.

“We were not hopeful of finding anything considerable,” said Selçuk University Archaeology Department academic Hakan Öniz. “Just then, we found a solid, very beautiful plate with its own colors. It made us very happy. We were amazed by the designs on it.

As we found the others, we were surprised by the motifs on each plate. There are fish and flower motifs unique to the era. The workmanship was very good. All of them were 800-900 years old.”

Among the most striking plates in the set are unique ones that are in the same design and color but in different sizes.

The ship that was carrying the plates is thought to have sunk after hitting a rock sometime in the 12th century. The Byzantine Empire underwater excavations started in 2014 in collaboration with Dokuz Eylül University, Selçuk University and the Antalya Museum.

The finds are being cleaned of salt at the Antalya Museum Directorate’s laboratory. When the work is done, the plates will be displayed at the Antalya Museum. Öniz said the plates off Adrasan were scattered over an area of 15 to 20 meters.

“The ship was loaded with plates from two different plate factories. We don’t know where these factories are. I say two different factories because there are two different techniques used on the plates. We see that the plate set existed 900 years ago, too, and that women took care of their sets,” he said.

He said they had found the plates underwater on top of each other. Most of them were broken, while some had been taken by people, he added. There are a number of other plates along the coasts of Antalya and Mersin, but many are too deep to retrieve, he said.

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From Cosmo Magazine

In July 1942, German submarine U-576 sank the freighter SS Bluefields during the battle of Convoy KS-520 off the coast of North Carolina.

The convoy fought back, though, and return fire from US Navy Armed Guard and an aerial depth charge attack sank the U-boat. The vessels lay on the sea floor for decades as fish and other marine life moved in and made them home.

More than 70 years later, in 2014, the wrecks were rediscovered and in August and September this year, the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and research partners went in for a closer look. This is what they found.

During the very first dive of the expedition, scientists located and explored the German U-576.

This was the first time since the submarine was sunk on 15 July 1942 that anyone had laid eyes on the vessel.

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By Mary Lynn Smith - Star Tribune

The Antelope, an 1800s schooner barge, rests about 300 below the surface of Lake Superior near the Apostle Islands. A trio of shipwreck hunters found the nearly intact ship earlier this month.

Resting more than 300 feet below Lake Superior’s surface, two distinctive ship’s masts rose from the lake’s dark depths. A six-year search for the Antelope, an 1800s schooner barge, was over.

A dedicated trio of shipwreck hunters discovered the nearly intact ship resting in the waters near the Apostle Islands. The find is remarkable because it’s one of the only wooden schooners found at the bottom of the lake with its masts still standing, said Jerry Eliason, 63, of Scanlon, who found the Antelope, along with Ken Merryman, 67, of Fridley, and Kraig Smith, 63, of Rice Lake, Wis.

Before the ship was discovered earlier in September, it also was one of about 30 wrecks still missing in Lake Superior, he said. “They’re all pieces of history,” said Merryman, a retired computer engineer who has hunted shipwrecks for more than 40 years.

“They all hold information about the maritime history of our region. As someone who discovers this, you get to open a time capsule and see first hand what treasure is there.

And you get to solve a mystery at the same time.” Lake Superior holds onto about 400 shipwrecks, Eliason said. Most of those ships were driven into shore in a fog, a storm or blizzard and are “broken up into bits and pieces and shredded,” he said.

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By Megan Gannon - Mentafloss

The long-sought shipwreck of the HMS Terror has reportedly been located, more than 160 years after it disappeared in the Canadian Arctic.

The discovery comes two years after the identification of Terror’s sister ship, the HMS Erebus. It’s hoped that the wrecks could illuminate the desperate end of Sir John Franklin’s mission to find the Northwest Passage in the 1840s.

All 129 crew members from the polar expedition for British Royal Navy died after the ships became stranded in ice. A team from the Arctic Research Foundation aboard the research vessel Martin Bergmann said they located the sunken ship last week in King William Island’s uncharted Terror Bay, according to The Guardian, which first reported the discovery.

Over the weekend, the researchers sent a robotic vehicle underwater to explore the ship. Video footage shows that the ship has been quite well preserved in frigid waters 80 feet below the surface—rope, an exhaust pipe, a mess-hall table, glass panes, wine bottles, the bell, and even the helm are intact. Adrian Schimnowski, the foundation’s operations director, claimed there were still plates on the shelves in the food storage room.

The research team believes the ship sank gently to the seafloor. Parks Canada, the government agency that has been leading efforts to search for and explore Terror and Erebus, said that it is working with its partners to validate the details of the discovery.

But the news was already being cheered by the community of shipwreck hunters and historians. “Seeing the images of HMS Terror—her bowsprit still set, her bell, her railings, all in pristine order—feels as profound a moment as when a camera first passed over the bow of the Titanic,” Russell Potter, author of Finding Franklin: The Untold Story of a 165-Year Search, said in a statement by the Royal Canadian Geographical Society.

“We’re witnesses to a discovery, the end result of a century and a half of searches, that will profoundly alter, augment—and doubtless complicate—our understanding of the final fate of the Franklin expedition,” Potter said.

The murky fate of the Franklin expedition has long captured the imagination of historians, amateur sleuths, and authors from Mark Twain to Margaret Atwood.

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By Yasuji Nagai - The Asahi Shimbun

While scuba diving is enjoyed worldwide today, few enthusiasts may be aware that the origins of their hobby can be traced to a pioneering Japanese immigrant in prewar Australia.

Yasukichi Murakami (1880-1944) is credited with single-handedly developing advanced models of diving gear that substantially expanded the scope of the activity before the introduction of scuba.

Hailing from Wakayama Prefecture, Murakami obtained patents on valves and apparatuses for the diving gear while introducing pearl farming to Australia.

He died after being sent to an internment camp when the war between Japan and the United States broke out. He was not forgotten, however, and in recent years, his achievement has been re-evaluated.

Murakami was born in Tanami (present-day Kushimoto) in Wakayama Prefecture. He moved to Australia in 1897 and became a storekeeper in Broome in the northwest of the country. He also became a pillar of the Japanese immigrant community.

In the 1910s, Murakami started pearl fishing, which was thriving back in those days, in partnership with an Australian businessman. Pearl farming was developed by Kokichi Mikimoto in Japan but had not yet been introduced to Australia, and so many of the immigrants were collecting natural pearls as divers.

Using an old model of a diving suit developed in 1836, many divers were harmed physically from the bends, also known as decompression sickness, which is caused by the formation of gas bubbles in the blood that occur with a sudden change of pressure during diving. In 1913, 28 divers died of the bends there.

Murakami decided to improve the swimming suit.

After a great deal of trial and error, Murakami finally invented an advanced model of diving gear by the mid-1920s.

By Evan Lubofsky - Hakai Magazine

There’s a three-way war being waged over the ancient shipwrecks that dot the ocean floor. On one side, marine archaeologists are rushing to study and preserve these historical sites.

On another, treasure hunters and salvagers are staking their claims. Meanwhile, both groups are racing against the clock. “We’re seeing severe damage to wreck sites,” says marine archaeologist Mike Brennan. “It’s ongoing, and every day that we wait for protection of these sites, trawlers are scraping them apart.”

Fishing fleets are the unwitting third power in this dispute. Archaeologists and treasure hunters have different motives, but fishing trawlers are wreaking havoc, their weighted nets pulling at wrecks and disrupting these sunken treasures.

In preserving maritime history, says Brennan, time is of the essence. Brennan has seen the devastation trawlers can cause firsthand. During a recent study, he and his colleagues made two surveys of a wreck site off the coast of Turkey.

In the 11 months between cruises to visit the Ereğli E, a trading vessel that carried wine, olive oil, and other goods across the Mediterranean, a delivery truck’s worth of artifacts from the fourth century BCE—including ceramic jars and human bones—had been dragged away or dismantled by fishing gear.

In reality, Brennan had anticipated the damage. His study had been designed, in part, to document the damage trawlers can cause, and fuel the case for establishing marine protected areas around ancient wreck sites.

Brennan, like many marine archaeologists, is of the mind that humanity’s sunken past should stay beneath the waves and off the auction block.

And, he says fishing bans around wrecks will thwart excavation by treasure hunters, who often use the threat of trawl damage as an excuse to haul up and sell artifacts. Sean Kingsley, director of Wreck Watch International, takes issue with the excuse theory, saying it is disingenuous to suggest that the threat of damage through fishing is used to justify commercial exploitation.

But he also doesn’t see the viability in trying to preserve all wrecks on the ocean floor.

“Who will pay to enforce the continuous monitoring of endangered sites is hard to imagine,” he says. “And ring-fencing a wreck would need to be a permanent measure, financially and administratively.”

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By Dan Scanlan - The Florida Times

Jacksonville’s most historic shipwreck may have been damaged by submerged telephone cables draped over or through its 152-year-old wooden bones, according to the man who led its archaeological exploration in the 1980s and ’90s off Mandarin Point.

So Keith Holland is pushing the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to get the cables moved from the National Historic Landmark site of the Union steamship Maple Leaf and the thousands of U.S. Army artifacts buried within it.

As he helps a third company reroute a planned third cable around the 1864 shipwreck, Holland said he wonders how the Maple Leaf’s federal protection apparently failed.

“The state and federal statutes of the National Historic Preservation Act appear to be worthless because somehow, unknown to me, the shipwreck site had telecommunications cables put across it,” Holland said. “Although I am gravely concerned about this transgression, I am not dispirited by it. …

Right now my major objective is to test our state and federal historic preservation statutes to see what can be done to mitigate this.”

The Maple Leaf was headed to Jacksonville early April 1, 1864, with the possessions of the 112th and 169th New York and the 13th Indiana regiments onboard when Confederate mines blew its bow off, killing four. Most of the wreck ended under 7 feet of mud, which kept the 900,000 pounds of personal and military gear inside preserved.

In 1989, Holland and St. Johns Archaeological Expeditions began excavating part of it, recovering 4,500 artifacts over the next few years, including shoes, belt buckles and a rare gum rubber rain hat.

In 1994, it was declared a National Historic Landmark, joining the Civil War ironclad USS Monitor off North Carolina as the only shipwrecks on that list. Landmark designation is given to sites that possess “exceptional value” in commemorating U.S. history and is supposed to protect them, according to the National Park Service.

Florida and the Park Service set up a 24-acre buffer zone around the actual wreck. Yet Holland found two cables were laid through that buffer zone. In his July 1 letter to the federal Advisory Council on Historic Preservation, he asked for remedial action and fines “for the negligent acts” of the state, Corps of Engineers Jacksonville and others.

The advisory council forwarded its own inquiry to the corps, which responded Aug. 19. Jacksonville corps regulatory official Tori White’s letter verified a permit was issued in 1990 so Southern Bell could lay a telephone line underwater between Mandarin and Orange Park.

The permit was approved prior to historic designation, so compliance with the preservation act wasn’t required, she wrote. But Holland said the wreck site was well-known before that designation, as was his team’s investigation, with dozens of stories in the Times-Union about it between 1985 and 1989.

Plus, the corps approved work there, he said.

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From the Mirror

Littering the sea floor like discarded toys these are the forgotten shipwrecks of the Atlantic Ocean dating back to the First World War .

The liners were sunk by torpedoes and mines and now lie on the seabed, just off the Irish coast.

Among the wrecks are merchant vessels, submarines and ocean liners, with HMS Audacious being the oldest ruin. HMS Audacious sank in October 1914 after hitting a German mine.

All but one passengers survived after Titanic’s sister ship, the White Star liner Olympic, came to the rescue. Also lying on the seabed is HMS Viknor, an armed merchant cruiser which sank without sending a distress signal with all 295 Royal Navy officers on board.

Remarkably, the wreck was not found until 2006 even though it met its fate on January 13 1915 and now rests under more than 250 feet of water.

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