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By Kat Long - Mentafloss.com

From a shallow Arctic gulf, a treasure trove of objects from the HMS Erebus shipwreck has been brought to the surface for the first time in more than 170 years. The items could offer new clues about the doomed Franklin expedition, which left England in 1845 to search for the Northwest Passage.

All 129 people perished from still-uncertain causes—a mystery that was fictionalized in the AMC series The Terror in 2018. Marc-André Bernier, head of underwater archaeology at Parks Canada, said in a teleconference from Ottawa that this year’s research season was the most successful since the discovery of the HMS Erebus shipwreck in 2014.

Parks Canada divers and Inuit located the HMS Terror, the second ship of the Franklin expedition, in 2016.

From mid-August to mid-September, 2019, the Parks Canada and Inuit research team began systematically excavating the large and complex shipwreck. “We focused on areas that had not been disturbed since the ship had sunk,” Bernier said.

“Right now, our focus is the cabins of the officers, and we’re working our way toward the higher officers. That’s where we think we have a better chance of finding more clues to what happened to the expedition, which is one of the major objectives.”

Over a total of 93 dives this year, archaeologists concentrated on three crew members’ cabins on the port side amidships: one belonging to the third lieutenant, one for the steward, and one likely for the ice master.

In drawers underneath the third lieutenant’s bed, they discovered a tin box with a pair of the officer’s epaulets in “pristine condition,” Bernier said. They may have belonged to James Walter Fairholme, one of the three lieutenants on the Erebus.

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By Jill Neimark - Hakai Magazine
 

Most visitors come to Cape Canaveral, on the northeast coast of Florida, for the tourist attractions. It’s home to the second-busiest cruise ship port in the world and is a gateway to the cosmos. Nearly 1.5 million visitors flock here every year to watch rockets, spacecraft, and satellites blast off into the solar system from Kennedy Space Center Visitor Complex, reminding us of the restless reach of our species.

Nearly 64 kilometers of undeveloped beach and 648 square kilometers of protected refuge fan out from the cape’s sandy shores. And then there’s the draw of relics like Turtle Mound, a vast hill containing 27,000 cubic meters of oyster shells left by Indigenous tribes several thousand years ago.

Yet some of Cape Canaveral’s most storied attractions lie unseen, wedged under the sea’s surface in mud and sand, for this part of the world has a reputation as a deadly ship trap. Over the centuries, dozens of stately Old World galleons smashed, splintered, and sank on this irregular stretch of windy Florida coast.

They were vessels built for war and commerce, traversing the globe carrying everything from coins to ornate cannons, boxes of silver and gold ingots, chests of emeralds and porcelain, and pearls from the Caribbean—the stuff of legends.

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By Jim Mendoza - Hawaii News Now
 

Crystal clear video shows new images of a World War II aircraft sitting on the ocean floor about three miles off Oahu’s Kaneohe coast. The Grumman TBF Avenger crashed after colliding with another military plane during a training flight in 1942.

The documenting was done by Project Recover, the Scripps Institution of Oceanography and the University of Delaware. "We were able to re-locate that site and document it," said Andrew Pietruszka, Project Recover's lead archaeologist.

Scientists used sonar to zero in on the torpedo bomber at a depth of 300 feet, then used a camera on a submersible to survey the site. "Right through that camera lens, boom! Looks like you could almost take and fly it," Pietruszka said.

Even after 77 years underwater the airplane’s wings, cockpit, tail section and engine are still visible.

"This mission in particular was very special because it was on U.S. soil," Project Recover co-founder Eric Terrill said. The video and photographs will be used to build a three-dimensional model of the aircraft.

"It's sitting upright as it would be on a carrier deck or on the runway," Pietruszka said. The Defense Department's POW/MIA Accounting Agency will decide whether recovery of remains is possible. The Avenger's three-man crew is listed as missing in action.

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From Fox News
 

The sunken wreck of the Titanic will be protected under a new treaty agreed to by the United States and the United Kingdom.

More than 100 years after the ill-fated ship sank to the bottom of the sea when it hit an iceberg, the formal agreement includes managing and safeguarding one of the world’s most culturally significant sites.

“This momentous agreement with the United States to preserve the wreck means it will be treated with the sensitivity and respect owed to the final resting place of more than 1,500 lives,” said British Maritime Minister Nusrat Ghani in a statement announcing the news on Tuesday.

“The UK will now work closely with other North Atlantic States to bring even more protection to the wreck of the Titanic.”

The Titanic hit an iceberg at 11:40 p.m. ship’s time on April 14, 1912, and sank on its maiden voyage just over two hours later with the loss of all but 706 of the 2,223 people onboard, according to a Senate report released at the time.

The Titanic incident led to the drawing up of the SOLAS (Safety of Lives at Sea) Convention in 1914, which sets the minimum safety standards by which ships are required to comply worldwide.

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By Nick Dall - BBC.com
 

On 25 March 1647 – five years before the Dutch East India Company, Vereenigde Oostindische Compagnie (VOC) in Dutch, had established the Cape Town settlement just north of the Cape of Good Hope – the Nieuw Haarlem foundered in Table Bay’s shallow waters.

Luckily, no lives were lost, and much of the precious cargo the ship was bringing back to the Netherlands (via South Africa) from Asia was salvageable.

Not long after the incident, 58 crew members were taken back to the Netherlands by the other ships in the fleet. But the remaining 62 men were left behind to look after the valuable spices, pepper, textiles and porcelain until a larger fleet could give them and their cargo a lift home about a year later.

If they hadn’t stayed, said Gerald Groenewald of the University of Johannesburg’s Department of History, “the history of colonial South Africa could have turned out very differently.”

Dutch and other European ships had been stopping at Table Bay and Saldanha Bay (some 130km to the north) since the 1590s to load up on drinking water and barter livestock.

But the experience of the Nieuw Haarlem survivors was the “catalyst” that determined which of the powers would be the first to settle in the region and where precisely they would settle. For the Dutch, it was Cape Town.

After 1652, according to Groenewald, “the English started to concentrate more on St Helena as a halfway station. The French continued to call at Saldanha Bay from time to time but also had their own colony in Reunion.”

Werz, who started his career as a marine archaeologist in the Netherlands, moved to South Africa in 1988 to take up a lecturing position at the University of Cape Town. Within a few weeks of arriving, a member of the public phoned to say she thought she’d found the remains of the Nieuw Haarlem.

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By Laura O'Callaghan - Express.co.uk

Experts examined the amphorae - tall jugs or jars with handles and narrow necks used by the Greeks and the Romans - and were able to determine the period in which they were used.

Dr George Ferentinos of the University of Patras and a team of researchers dated the wreck to between the 1st century BC and the first century AD. They found the wreck using sonar imaging to search the seabed around the island of Cephalonia, or Kefalonia, reports the Journal of Archaeological Science. 

They dubbed it the Fiscardo after the nearby fishing port popular with tourists. 

Dr Ferentinos said if the ship was removed from the floor of the Mediterranean in the future, researchers could get their hands on the hull which may hold more clues about its origin. He said the Fiscardo is among the largest four shipwrecks dating from this period to have been found in the Med. 

Dr Ferentinos said: “Its half-buried in the sediment, so we have high expectations that if we go to an excavation in the future, we will find part or the whole wooden hull.” 

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By Ian Randall - Mail Online

Incredible footage reveals a Roman shipwreck containing more than 100 perfectly preserved amphorae that underwater archaeologists are painstakingly recovering.

The wreck — which experts have dated back to around 1,700 years ago — was found off of the coast of Mallorca back in July 2019.

Based on some of the inscriptions on the long, two-handled jars, the archaeologists believe that the amphorae were used to store fish sauce, oil and wine. The wreck was found off of the coast of Mallorca's Can Pastilla Beach in July after local resident Felix Alarcón and his wife spotted pottery shards on the seabed.

After investigating, archaeologists found the Roman boat buried in the seabed mere feet from the shore. 

In a press conference, archaeologist Sebastian Munar of the Balearic Institute of Maritime Archaeology Studies said that the amphorae were perfectly conserved in the ship's hold. However, researchers will not be able to open them to check until they have finished preservation work that will stop the salt in the sea water cracking the jars.

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From The Maritime Executive
 

Royal Navy bomb disposal experts have destroyed a one-tonne German WWII-era bomb found within the wreck of a 17th century warship near Southend Pier in Essex, England. 

Civilian divers with Historic England discovered the device during an archeological dive on the 350-year-old protected shipwreck of the London, which lies in two parts near the pier.

An eight-man team of Royal Navy divers from Portsmouth were dispatched to the area, where they towed the device out of the estuary to safely destroy it at sea in a complex six-day operation. It took 27 hours on the water, equating to 216 man hours, with 20 dives accumulating 375 minutes underwater. Visibility below the surface was zero, and tidal currents during working periods were up to one knot. The Thames Estuary can flow at up to three knots at this time, limiting the available work periods. 

"Dealing with one of the largest pieces of German Second World War ordnance in the Thames Estuary presents some of the most challenging diving conditions there are to work in," said Lieutenant Ben Brown, Officer in Charge of Southern Diving Unit Two. "With nil visibility underwater and significant tidal flow, the diving windows are extremely limited and all work on the ordnance must be done by touch."

"The deteriorating weather conditions of this week also added another layer of complexity, and all whilst working next to one of the busiest shipping channels in the UK. However, these conditions are exactly what Royal Navy Clearance Divers are trained to work under and my team did an excellent job of keeping the public - and other mariners - safe," he said. 

The WWII German parachute ground mine contained a main charge of 697kg of Hexamite, equivalent to 767kg of TNT, and weighed 987kg in total. Known as a GC, it was one of the largest pieces of ordnance used by the Luftwaffe during the Second World War.

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