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From Times on Line (click on the picture to see a video)Take the plunge in Brussels, where £4m has been splashed out on a pool with a depth of 33 metres. World-class scuba diving has not, historically, been among Belgium's claim to fame.

Chocolates, the Smurfs, the European Parliament and statues of micturating minors, yes. Clear blue water and coral reefs, no.

So 11 years ago, a civil engineer with a passion for the underwater world decided that it was time this situation was redressed.

John Beernaerts's dream of creating the world's first indoor diving complex began as a simple doodle, sketched on a napkin in a Brussels bar.

Today John and I are sitting at another bar as waiters carry drinks and Thai food to tables. Facing us is a row of large, square windows.

Every few seconds a diver drifts past, blowing bubbles in the blue space behind the glass. It's a human aquarium.

By Lina Sinjab


On Arwad Island off the coast of Syria, a group of 20 sailors-to-be are preparing for a voyage their captain believes has not been undertaken for two and a half millennia. 

They plan to set off on Sunday on a journey that attempts to replicate what the Greek historian Herodotus mentions as the first circumnavigation of Africa in about 600BC. 

Their vessel, the small, pine-wood Phoenicia, is modelled on the type of ship the Phoenician sailors he credited with the landmark voyage would have used. 

The Phoenicians lived in areas of modern-day Lebanon, Syria and other parts of the Mediterranean from about 1200BC and are widely credited with being both strong seafarers and the first civilisation to make extensive use of an alphabet.

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By Ben Langford


Rogue divers are raiding heritage-listed wrecks in Darwin Harbour, regular visitors to the sites said yesterday. 

Local divers said artefacts had been stolen from the RAAF C-47 plane wreck in Fannie Bay. 

Regular diver Peter Darlington dived the wreck recently and said items including a radio, flight gauges and a fire extinguisher had been taken.

An engine and a propeller had also been dislodged.

"Many of the artefacts have been removed and there are signs of extensive damage to the airframe itself," he said.

There are fears that other wrecks in the harbour may have been looted.

Some of the damage to the C-47 appeared to have been done by a large anchor, though anchoring at the site is not allowed.

The raids are recent, probably within the past two months.


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By Gordon Dritschilo

Vermont's latest historical site is at the bottom of Lake Champlain.

The wreck of the Spitfire, a Revolutionary War gunboat, was added to the National Register of Historical Places Friday.

Part of the fleet hastily assembled by Benedict Arnold in 1776, the Spitfire was sunk at the Battle of Valcour Island, an engagement that, while a defeat for the American rebels, held off a British advance from Canada until the following year.

A replica of the Spitfire's sister ship, the Philadelphia, is at the Lake Champlain Maritime Museum in Vergennes.

Also sunk in the battle, the Philadelphia was raised in 1935 and the remains of the original are in the Smithsonian Institution.

Adam Kane, a nautical archeologist with the Maritime Museum, said the designation was significant for two reasons.

"One, it puts it on the list of historical and archaeological sites in the country designated as worthy of preservation and historically signifi-cant," he said.

"The second, more tangible thing it does is open it up to more federal funding."

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By Paul Chapman


Scientists are baffled after carbon dating showed the skull, a woman's which was found near the country's capital, Wellington, dates back from 1742 – decades before Cook's Pacific expedition arrived in 1769. 

The discovery was made by a boy walking his dog on the bank of a river in the Wairarapa region of the North Island, an area settled by Europeans only after the establishment of a colony by the New Zealand Company in 1840. 

Dr Robin Watt, a forensic anthropologist called in by police who investigated the discovery, said yesterday: "It's a real mystery, it really is. "We've got the problem of how did this woman get here ? Who was she ? 

"I recommended they do carbon date on it and, of course, they came up with that amazing result."


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By Bradley T. Lepper


Archaeologists in the UK are exploring a vast expanse of sea floor between southeastern England and the Netherlands that, between 8,000 and 10,000 years ago, was a rich landscape inhabited by Mesolithic hunters and gatherers.

The team named this sunken world "Doggerland", which Laura Spinney describes in the July 10 issue of Nature as having once been a paradise of marshes, lakes and rivers.

Using seismic survey data, these archaeologists have created a map of Doggerland that is providing crucial context for artifacts that occasionally are scooped up in fishing nets.

James Adovasio, director of the Mercyhurst Archaeological Institute in Erie, Pa., and C. Andrew Hemmings, an archaeologist with the University of Texas at Austin, are leading an expedition that is surveying the seabed along the Gulf Coast of Florida.

Having mapped the submerged landscape, they will send a diving robot to explore likely locations for archaeological sites.

Ohio has its own lost world beneath Lake Erie. With the advance and retreat of glaciers, Lake Erie has risen and fallen dramatically over the millennia. About 4,000 years ago, the level of the lake was about 30 feet below modern levels.


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By Shaila Dewan


Pirate lore has it that in the late 17th century, horses bearing lanterns were led along the barrier islands near Beaufort, luring ships to be pillaged and sunk. But that was only one of many perils by which the North Carolina coast earned the nickname Graveyard of the Atlantic.

From the Queen Anne's Revenge, Blackbeard's hijacked French slaver, to the Monitor, the ironclad Civil War vessel, many a ship has been doomed by converging currents, rocky shoals, treacherous storms and, in World War II, lurking U-boats.

In 1921, the schooner Carroll A. Deering was stranded in a storm on Diamond Shoals; rescuers found it abandoned, making the fate of the crew one of the enduring mysteries of maritime history.

But the seascape that for centuries menaced sailors is, it turns out, a Xanadu for scuba divers. The water is clear, warmed by the Gulf Stream and populated by tropical marine life against the operatic backdrop of the mammoth, ghostly shipwrecks.

Unlike reef diving, wreck diving offers both natural splendor and human narrative -- lionfish and octopus, rust and cannon.

From The Canadian Press


The recent discovery of a British warship that foundered in Lake Ontario during the American Revolution has many marine history buffs likening the find to the Holy Grail of the Great Lakes.

But shipwreck hunters believe the "ultimate Grail" of the Lakes is still entombed in the cold, murky depths.

Last spring, U.S. wreck enthusiasts Jim Kennard and Dan Scoville located HMS Ontario below the waves of Lake Ontario, not far from the New York shoreline.

Kennard's quest to find the watery grave of the Ontario, which was lost with 130 people on board during a powerful gale in 1780, had spanned 35 years.

The 64-year-old is one of many to call the 22-gun sloop of war the "Holy Grail of the Lakes," but even he acknowledges the most treasured wreck is still out there.

"I think the boat that would top it would be the Griffon," he told The Canadian Press in an interview from his home outside Rochester, N.Y.

"That would maybe be the ultimate Grail."

The Griffon was the vessel of noted French explorer Rene-Robert Cavelier, Sieur de La Salle. It is believed to be the first ship to sail the upper Great Lakes.