Wreck of HMS
Ontario found
6/14/08
A British warship that sank in Lake Ontario 228 years ago during the War
of Independence has been found almost intact by Jim Kennard and
Dan Scoville. The
ship was a few hours into a voyage from Fort Niagara on Oct. 31, 1780, when
it foundered in a sudden, violent storm. There were
no survivors. HMS Ontario lies in an area where the water reaches depths of
more than 150 metres and there's no visible light. The team found the ship
with a sonar scanner and confirmed its identity bya remote-controlled
submersible.
Rich Wreck
5/18/07
Odyssey Marine Exploration, a publicly traded treasure hunting company, announced
to have found what could be the richest sunken treasure ever
discovered: hundreds
of
thousands
of
colonial-era
silver
and gold coins worth an estimated $500 million from a shipwreck in the Atlantic
Ocean.
Company co-founder Greg Stemm said a formal announcement will come later, but court records indicate the coins might have come from the wreck of a 17th century merchant ship found off southwestern England.
So far, the richest-ever shipwreck haul was yielded by the Spanish galleon Nuestra Senora de Atocha, which sank in a hurricane off the Florida Keys in 1622. Treasure-hunting pioneer Mel Fisher found it in 1985, retrieving a reported $400 million in coins and other loot.
Window
to the Center of the Earth
3/7/07
A team of British scientists
under geophysicist and lead researcher Prof. Roger Searle of Durham University
is en route on the inaugural research cruise of the new UK research ship RRS
James Cook from the Canary Islands to a location 11,000 ft underwater in the
middle of the Atlantic. Here, scientists have previously found a large area hundreds
of square miles in the middle of the Atlantic where the Earth's crust seems
to be missing entirely. Instead, the mantle - the deep interior of the Earth,
normally covered by crust many kilometres thick - is exposed on the seafloor. The
researchers are planning to use sonars to image the seafloor and then take rock
cores using a robotic seabed drill. The samples will provide a rare opportunity
to
gain insights
into the workings of the mantle deep below the surface of the Earth. Searle said: “This
is probably the first area where the mantle has been observed extensively on
the seafloor. It gives us a unique opportunity to study this enigmatic
part of the Earth in detail. ... Our current theories suggest that as the
tectonic plates separate, the
mantle
rises to fill the gap and, in doing so, partly melts. ... The molten rock
or magma is then emplaced on the seafloor through volcanoes to build new crust.
It looks as though the melting may not be occurring here,
and
we may be looking at a wholly different way of creating and spreading the plates.”
For details of the expedition, click here.
Maltese Falcon Sets Sail
7/14/06
Tom Perkins' "Maltese Falcon" set sail in Italy on July
14 after five years of development and construction. The designers
claim is the largest and fastest personal sailboat in the world. The 87.5-meter
yacht is equipped with three 57-meter tall masts
and each mast has six yards from which hang sails. The
masts were constructed by CarbonIndex
Ltd. They rotate depending on the wind
direction controlled by a fiber-optic sensor system that gathers data on wind
speed and
force.
The
systems was developed by English company Insensys. The concept of rotating
masts was first conceived in the 1960s by German hydraulics engineer
Wilhelm
Prolls. More ...
Titanic
Sunk in Just 5 Minutes
12/12/05
Scientists sponsored by the History Channel visited the wreck in August and
discovered two large pieces of the ship's
hull half a kilometer away from the stern. According to Roger Long, a naval architect
who studied the recent discovery, the vessel hit the iceberg and the hull broke
loose before the stern split. He
said the ship only took five minutes to sink. Before the August expedition, David
Brown, a Titanic historian had said the stern took twenty minutes to plunge into
the ocean. More ...
For information about the discovery of the Titanic, click here.
This footage was shot in 2005 by Rob Goldsmith, for the UK History Channel's documentary "Titanic - A Tale of Two Journeys".
Magan
Expedition
9/12/05
The 40
foot bronze-age style boat Magan sinks within 30 min after leaving port
Sur. The boat was made from reeds, date-palm fibers and bitumen tar, with
a
wool sail and two teak oars. The team was hoping to make the 600 mile
voyage across the Indian Ocean to the historic Indian port of Mandvi to
follow what archaeologists believe was a Bronze Age trade route.All rew
members survived and have plans to rebuilt the boat. More
...
