HOT NEWS !

By Paul Rogers - Mercury News

Famed oceanographer Robert Ballard discovered the Titanic, the Bismarck, the USS Yorktown and John F. Kennedy's PT-109.

On Tuesday, he added another accomplishment to his list of documenting the world's greatest shipwrecks: the first images in more than six decades of the USS Independence, an iconic World War II aircraft carrier scuttled in 1951 off the California coast, half a mile under the sea.

In a 20-hour-long expedition, Ballard's team, working with officials from the Navy and NOAA -- the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration -- revealed breathtaking images of the lost carrier's flight deck, a Hellcat fighter plane, anti-aircraft guns, hatches, ladders and even the letters of the ship's name still visible on the hull, all submerged 30 miles west of Half Moon Bay.

Thousands of viewers in more than 30 countries watched the discoveries live over the Internet.

"What's so wonderful about the wrecks in deeper water, like this ship, the Titanic and the Bismarck, is that they are in amazing states of preservation," Ballard said Tuesday, still at sea.

"There's very little change from when the Navy scuttled it," he said.

"The deep sea is the largest museum on Earth." Ballard, a retired Navy officer, and his organization, the Ocean Exploration Trust, based in Connecticut, plan to build a detailed 3-D digital image of the Independence from the thousands of photographs they took with two unmanned submersibles on Monday and Tuesday.

"It was really nice to read the name on the side," he joked.

"You think, 'Good, I found the right ship'."

Full article...
 

Ouest France

A la suite du drame vécu le 8 juin 1912 dans le Raz Blanchard, à la pointe de la Hague dans la Manche, la localisation exacte du sous-marin coulé, le Vendémiaire, n'était pas connue.

L'expédition de quatre plongeurs d'Omonville-la-Rogue pour retrouver l'épave vient de mettre un terme à cela : la plongée a porté ses fruits, mardi dernier.

Il s'agit bien du sous-marin coulé accidentellement par le cuirassé Saint-Louis, le 8 juin 1912, au large de la Hague, confirme Matthias Dufour, un des quatre plongeurs chasseurs d'épaves.

Ces derniers viennent de partager sur les réseaux sociaux une vidéo de leur découverte.

Une expédition pour retrouver ce sous-marin cherbourgeois devait avoir lieu l'année dernière, mais les plongeurs d'Omonville-la-Rogue ont été finalement les premiers à mettre la main dessus.

From Sputnik News

A team of three archeologist-enthusiasts from New York State discovered the wreck deep at the bottom of Lake Ontario.

Adventurers Jim Kennard, Roger Pawlowski and Roland Stevens identified the vessel using high-resolution side-scan sonar in late June. It took several more weeks to confirm that the discovery was the same ship known to have sunk there in 1803.

The ship, called the Washington, was a single-masted sloop, a rare type of vessel that navigated the Great Lakes in the late 18th and early 19th centuries.

The 36-ton Washington was built by Americans on Lake Erie in 1798 to transport goods and passengers between New York, Pennsylvania and Ontario.

Some four years later the sloop was sold to Canadian merchants that portaged it to Lake Ontario using oxen.

A year later, the boat, carrying $20,000 worth of East India goods from Kingston, Ontario, en route to Niagara, Ontario was caught in a severe storm.

The ship sank, and all five aboard drowned, including three crewmembers and two merchants. Historians said that no signs of the ship were found.

Contemporary reports claimed that some pieces of the ship washed ashore near Oswego.

Full article...

From CBC News

Filmmaker Jesse Davidge said he was inspired to make a documentary about the A.J. Goddard shipwreck because of a nagging feeling he always had growing up — that "there wasn't anything left to discover in the world."

The story of the Gold Rush-era steamboat, found at the bottom of Lake Laberge in 2008, showed him that wasn't true.

"People who weren't in the professional world, but still were able to help discover this boat really inspired me to want to tell the story to younger people," he said.

The ship went down during a winter storm in 1901 but its exact location was unknown until some divers, including Davidge's uncle, Doug Davidge of the Yukon Transportation Museum, "stumbled on it".

"That started the whole process of researching the vessel, and also surveying the vessel on the bottom of Lake Laberge," Doug Davidge said.

"People from all across North America became interested in it as this little time capsule of artifacts and a way of life, actually."

The wreck, still at the bottom of Lake Laberge, has been designated a Yukon historic site.

Divers regularly visit it, with the requisite government permit. The new film explores the Gold Rush history of the vessel, as well as its discovery by Doug Davidge and others.

Full article...

By Léa Surugue - International Business Times

Three shipwreck debris fields dating back to the mid-16th to 17th century may have been discovered in the waters of Cape Canaveral, Florida, by marine archaeology company Global Marine Exploration Inc.

Divers encountered different artefacts, which they have tied to the French colonial era in Florida, between 1562 and 1565. Cape Canaveral is a site that has long fascinated archaeologists and scientists, not least because it has for long been associated with American aeronautics and space research.

"There is a lot of interest regarding the site off the coasts of Cape Canaveral because it is situated near a Nasa base and an air force station so it is crucial to survey and explore the whole coastline near these two centres.

It is in this context that we found remains of shipwrecks, three of those debris being from the colonial period," Global Marine Exploration Inc. President & CEO Robert H Pritchett, told IBTimes UK.

The shipwreck remnants were discovered in May 2016, but have only been announced recently to avoid attracting unwanted attention while the research was in progress.

Artefacts found in the scatter fields include three highly ornate bronze cannons, an iron cannon, 12 anchors, a 39-inch grinding wheel as well as scattered ballast and munitions, and what is believed to be a marble monument with the Coat of Arms of France, dating from the early colonial period.

Full article...

By Robert Trigaux - TBO

For more than two decades, Tampa’s Odyssey Marine Exploration has reveled with a reputation as a swashbuckling, deep-ocean treasure hunting enterprise.

Odyssey has hauled tons of gold and silver from centuries-old U.S., Spanish and British ships sunk far beneath the Atlantic Ocean and adjacent waters. The company has enjoyed the limelight of more front page stories over the years in the New York Times than most major U.S. corporations and far more than any other business in the Tampa Bay area.

It has been the focus of long sagas in magazines like The New Yorker and was profiled by a National Geographic staffer in the 2005 book Lost Gold of the Republic about what was then the richest monetary and archaeological marine salvage in American history.

In 2009 the Discovery Channel launched a reality called Treasure Quest with 12 episodes devoted to Odyssey Marine’s shipwreck adventures. “Shipwreck stuff was cool,” Odyssey Marine CEO Mark Gordon said in a sit-down interview this summer.

“The acid test is when your teenage daughter asks you to come to school day and tell them what you do.” Lately, the coolest Dad around now looks more like the Maytag repairman sitting by a phone that does not ring. Odyssey Marine’s forlorn Tampa headquarters sits back in a too-quiet office building on West Laurel Street, its second floor space eerily lean on employees.

Tight times in the past year forced cuts in office staff to 22 from more than 40. Nine years ago, when the company was in the thick of high-profile underseas treasure finds, Nasdaq-traded Odyssey basked in a stock price topping $80.

This year, its sub-$4 shares briefly spiked at $9 in April after Odyssey took a draconian move of converting every 12 shares to one in order to raise its stock value. But shares have since sunk again, now trading between $2 and $4. Nasdaq has warned Odyssey its market value (shares times its stock price) is still below the $35 million minimum value required to remain as a viable Nasdaq-traded company.

One of Odyssey’s last shipwreck finds in 2007, code named Black Swan, promised up to 500,000 gold and silver coins, a possible underwater mother lode. Except for one thing: Spain.

The country, claiming rights to the ship and its Spanish wealth, took legal action against Odyssey, eventually landing two C-130 airplanes at Tampa’s MacDill Air Force to load nearly 17 tons of salvaged coins and return the enormous bounty to Spain. That long legal fight diminished Odyssey’s stock price and resources, forcing company leaders to concede its days of treasure hunting as an independent company were at an end.

It all sounds bleak. And it is. Odyssey is at a crossroads. Will it slowly wither as a faded treasure hunting business, or reinvent itself as a business that can find even greater sources of wealth than shipwrecks on the ocean floor ?

Since its start, Odyssey’s future was built on its specialized skills as a deep ocean shipwreck finder. Few treasure hunters can pursue shipwrecks deeper than 1,000 feet and Odyssey used its ROV or “remotely operated vehicle” known as “Zeus” on wrecks as deep as 15,000 feet — nearly 3 miles underwater.

That’s what set it apart from so many shallow water treasure hunters. Gordon still ponders Odyssey’s choices.

Full article...

El Pais

"El Galeón San José lo vamos a recuperar siguiendo todos los cánones”, aseguró este sábado el presidente de Colombia, Juan Manuel Santos, durante la inauguración de la nueva sede del Instituto de Investigaciones Marinas y Costeras ‘José Benito Vives de Andréis’, en la ciudad de Santa Marta.

El mandatario de los colombianos señaló que la tarea de recuperación del galeón no será realizada por cazatesoros y que el propósito es permitir que la humanidad pueda gozar del patrimonio que se logre encontrar.

"Hay un aspecto que tiene que ver con esta institución y es muy importante: toda la riqueza marina que hay alrededor del San José para recuperar, para poder investigar”, advirtió e insistió en que la idea de rescatar la embarcación obedece a motivos científicos y arqueológicos, más que comerciales.

El pasado mes de mayo el Gobierno colombiano reveló que aceptó la colaboración de España para la fase de investigación del galeón, sin embargo, en la jornada de este sábado Santos no se refirió a la forma cómo participaría este país en el proceso de recuperación de la nave, hundida por la Armada británica en aguas del Caribe en 1708.

Desde diciembre del año anterior, cuando el presidente Santos informó a los colombianos sobre el hallazgo de la embarcación 307 años después de su hundimiento, se han profundizado las dudas sobre cuál debería ser el destino del galeón.

Mientras el Ejecutivo considera que es " asunto de Estado", España, a través de su secretario de Estado de Cultura, José María Lassalle, ha advertido que la "embarcación debe quedarse donde está" y que al ser un patrimonio de la Humanidad, como lo señala la Unesco, "plantea una serie de protocolos de funcionamiento en relación con la protección del patrimonio subacuático".

A esa voz, se han unido la de otros científicos que desaconsejan rescatar el barco, argumentando que podría perder valor para su estudio.&

Mas...

By Ramin Adibi - Past Horizons

A pottery assemblage consisting of fragments of food storage vessels and amphora belonging to the Sassanid era (224 to 651 CE) has been discovered in the first underwater archaeological investigations near the coastal city of Bushehr, south-western Iran.

Hossein Tofighian, exploration team supervisor explained that the underwater archaeological surveys under license from the Research Institute for Cultural Heritage and Tourism, are being carried out off the coastline of Bushehr as part of a field research program in partnership with the University of Medical Sciences.

Early on in the diving operations, the team discovered fragments of large food storage jars and torpedo-shaped amphora, leading them to conclude that there is a very high likelihood of an archaeological site within the shallow waters of the Bushehr Peninsula.