HOT NEWS !

By Barry Newman

Anybody want some top-secret seagoing vessels ? The Navy has a pair it doesn't need anymore. It has been trying to give them away since 2006, and they're headed for the scrap yard if somebody doesn't speak up soon.

One is called Sea Shadow. It's big, black and looks like a cross between a Stealth fighter and a Bat mobile. It was made to escape detection on the open sea.

The other is known as the Hughes (as in Howard Hughes) Mining Barge. It looks like a floating field house, with an arching roof and a door that is 76 feet wide and 72 feet high. Sea Shadow berths inside the barge, which keeps it safely hidden from spy satellites.

The barge, by the way, is the only fully submersible dry dock ever built, making it very handy -- as it was 35 years ago -- for trying to raise a sunken nuclear-armed Soviet submarine.

"I'm fascinated by the possibilities," Frank Lennon said one morning recently. Mr. Lennon runs -- or ran -- a maritime museum here in Providence. He was standing in a sleet storm on a wharf below a power plant, surveying the 297-foot muck-encrusted hulk of a Soviet submarine that he owns.

His only exhibit, it was open to the public until April 2007, when a northeaster hit Providence and the sub sank.

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From Det Norske Veritas As

The German submarine U-864 was torpedoed by the British submarine Venturer on February 9, 1945 and sunk approximately two nautical miles west of the island Fedje in Hordaland. U-864 was carrying about 67 metric tonnes of metallic mercury that implies a threat to the marine environment.

In September 2007 The Norwegian Costal Administration commissioned Det Norske Veritas to further investigate different alternatives to salvage the wreck and remove the mercury from the seabed.

The objective of this supplementary study is to propose a survey method, or combination of methods, that will give the best probability of detecting sub-bottom mercury canisters around the wreck of U-864.

DNV’s overall conclusion is: A combination of single caesium vapour magnetometer and pipetracker, positioned by acoustic LBL technique, is the preferred method to locate sub-bottom canisters.

The searching will take at least six days and all surface debris must be cleared from the site prior to operation.


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From the Earth Times

Discovered under centuries-old layers of dirt in 1948, then submerged under 20 metres of water, the ancient city of Seuthopolis is to emerge once again in a bold rescue project.

The magnificently preserved city, founded by the Thracian king Seuthes III in 323 BC, was discovered in central Bulgaria during the construction of a dam on the Tundzha river.

Despite the stunning discovery, Communist authorities went ahead with the dam and created the Koprinka reservoir six years later, in 1954, flooding Seuthopolis under 150 million cubic metres of water.

Now, a 150-million-euro (192-million-dollar) project by Bulgarian architect Jeko Tilev aims to right the wrong and expose the polis at the bottom of the reservoir to archaeologists and tourist by creating a dry well 20 metres deep and 420 metres across.

Once in place, the 1.27-kilometre wall, effectively a round pier, would allow further exploration and the reconstruction of five hectares now at the bottom of the reservoir, 160 kilometres east of Sofia near Kazanlak.

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By William Mullen

When the pirate ship Whydah broke up in a fierce storm off Cape Cod in 1717, it sank carrying the plunder from 54 ships it had seized over the last year. Of the 146 men aboard, 144 died.

For years the story of those pirates lay buried with the wreck and its treasure under 30 feet of sand—a tale of violent men who nonetheless built for themselves a mini-society that shed racial prejudice and operated on democratic principles.

A traveling exhibit opening Friday at the Field Museum uses artifacts salvaged from the Whydah—the first and only verified pirate shipwreck ever located and recovered—to shed light on the lives of these men. Objects on display include weapons, jewelry, gold and silver coins and ingots as well as clothing, everyday utensils and tools.

Named for a slave port in Africa, the Whydah (wee-dah) represented the best available maritime technology when it was built in England in 1715—a swift, powerfully armed ship designed to transport slaves to the New World.

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By Sarah Moore

Like a toy surprise in a box of Cracker Jacks - er, slightly water-logged Cracker Jacks, that is - a Civil War era shipwreck turned up among Hurricane Ike debris.

The discovery, thought to be previously uncharted, was made by crews last week scanning the bays around Galveston to chart debris.

While the find came as a kind of fun surprise to the contractors doing the work, State Marine Archeologist Steve Hoyt was pleased - but not terribly surprised.

"There have been nearly 2,000 ship wrecks (in Texas coastal waters), with a lot of those concentrated around the Galveston area," Hoyt said.

A surprising amount of Texas history is underwater. With many immigrants arriving here by ship, along with the goods and supplies they needed for frontier life, traveling by water was common.

The bays of the Galveston area were particularly busy.

"Much of the history of Texas is maritime history," Hoyt said.

Hoyt added it's possible the shipwreck had been buried in mud and Ike's surge might have uncovered it. Or, it could just be that it had simply been overlooked until now.

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By James Varley

Alderney’s President of the States has called for HMS Victory’s exact resting place to be revealed.

In a letter to The Times, Sir Norman Browse, pictured, said independent confirmation was needed to say whether the 265-year-old wreck lay in British, French, international or Alderney waters.

Sir Norman also suggested that the site be protected and asked the Ministry of Defence to ensure that professional archaeologists, working to archaeological rather than profit-seeking strategies, assessed the wreck.

Earlier this month, Florida-based Odyssey Marine Exploration announced that it found the wreck of Victory last May. It had become separated from escorting vessels as they returned from fighting the French fleet off Portugal in 1744.

According to Odyssey, the 175ft wooden man-of-war’s final resting place is around 100km from the Channel Islands. Before the announcement, however, it was thought that Victory sank off Les Casquets, west of Alderney.

Victory, which went down with the loss of all 1,100 officers and ratings, provided the inspiration for the ship commanded by Admiral Lord Nelson several decades later.

Sir Norman, who is chairman of the Alderney Maritime Trust, wrote: ‘Some years ago Alderney established a maritime trust to protect and excavate any wrecks discovered in its waters. The non-profit making trust hoped that one day it would find, study and excavate Victory.

By Lefteris Papadimas and Daniel Flynn

A corroded mechanism recovered by sponge divers from a sunken wreck near the Greek island of Antikythera in 1902 changed the study of the ancient world forever.

The Antikythera Mechanism, a system of bronze gears from the 2nd century BC, was used to calculate the date of the Olympic Games based on the summer solstice.

Its mechanical complexity was unequalled for 1,000 years, until the cathedral clocks of the Middle Ages.

Archaeologists believe hundreds more wrecks beneath the eastern Mediterranean may contain treasures, but a new law opening Greece's coastline to scuba diving has experts worried that priceless artifacts could disappear into the hands of treasure hunters.

"The future of archaeology in this part of the world is in the sea," said marine archaeologist Harry Tzalas. "This law is very dangerous, it opens the way to the looting of antiquities from the seabed which we don't even know exist."

Greece's 1932 antiquities law says all artifacts on land and in the sea belong to the state, but it does not regulate scuba diving, developed in the 1940s by Frenchman Jacques Cousteau.

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By Helen Fields

For a few days back in July 2007, it was hard for archaeologist Deborah Carlson to get any work done at her site off the Aegean coast of western Turkey.

She was leading an underwater excavation of a 2,000-year-old shipwreck, but the Turkish members of her crew had taken time off to vote in national elections. So things were quiet at her camp on an isolated cape called Kızılburun.

The shipwrecks' main cargo was 50 tons of marble—elements of a huge column sent on an ill-fated journey to a temple, Carlson thought. But she didn't know which temple, so she used all her days off to drive around the area looking at possibilities.

There were a lot—western Turkey, once part of ancient Greece and later in the Roman Empire, is home to sites like Ephesus and Troy.

But Carlson had narrowed down her choices to a list of nearby temples that were in use in the first century BC—the likely date of the shipwrecks' column.