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From i-newswire

The RMS Titanic arrived in London this week after sailing from Melbourne, Australia and a highly successful exhibition where 300,000 people visited Titanic: The Artifact Exhibition since it opened at the Melbourne Museum in April.

The public has an insatiable hunger for all that is Titanic. Last week an original promotional poster celebrating the Titanic's maiden voyage sold for $109,000. in London.

The Titanic Exhibition which just opened at the London O2 features new, never before seen artifacts. In addition to the artifacts that have been touring the globe on exhibition, the new collection of Titanic artifacts is sure to attract a record number of visitors.

Preserving Titanic artifacts requires a collaborative team of conservators, curators, registrars, archaeologists, historians and other experts to provide continual care and maintenance of the collection from the moment of recovery onward. By strictly following their procedures, RMST can safely share these unique artifacts with the public while respecting their historical context as reminders of the RMS Titanic legacy.

Coal recovered from the "2000 Research and Recovery Expedition" to the RMS Titanic has been designed into a Limited Edition 100th Anniversary Commemorative Coin that is now available for purchase to preserve the memory of the Titanic and those who died on that voyage.

Each collector coin is engraved with its own unique registration number and includes a Certificate of authenticity issued by RMS Titanic plus comes encased in a clear acrylic protective case.

Each certificate carries the RMS Titanic Seal by RMS Titanic, Inc. ensuring that is it inlaid with actual coal from the Titanic.

From Keys Net

A change in state dive-program regulations will leave deepwater mooring balls intact off the Florida Keys.

“In the Upper Keys, we stood to lose about 11 mooring balls on our shipwrecks,” said Rob Mitchell, owner of Keys Diver in Key Largo. “It would have been a substantial number.”

The mooring-buoy maintenance program, currently administered by the state Department of Environmental Protection on behalf of the Florida Keys National Marine Sanctuary, was poised to halt work on lines deeper than 100 feet, which exceeded the agency’s maximum depth for its divers.

In late October, the DEP amended its rules to allow its divers to exceed 100 feet, as long as the agency receives advance notice. Other safety rules also were put in place.

“This issue has been resolved and Florida’s Department of Environmental Protection has made changes to its dive program which will allow FKNMS to continue maintenance of these buoys,” Sanctuary Superintendent Sean Morton said in an e-mail this week.

Mitchell said the news was welcomed by the Keys dive industry, which was considering a plan to take over some of the deepwater mooring-buoy maintenance.

“Even with the buoys we have now, in our busy summer season we have dive boats waiting in line to use the mooring lines at the shipwrecks,” Mitchell said.

“If we lost 50 percent of the moorings, people would have been racing out there at 6 a.m. to tie off to one of the moorings.”

The mooring balls help preserve the underwater environment by not requiring boat crews to drop a heavy anchor.

By Tim Finan and David Wilkes - Daily Mail

For 66 years, the brave young Spitfire pilot’s final resting place had been a mystery.

Flight Lieutenant Henry Lacy Smith was shot down by the Germans five days after D-Day on a mission supporting the Allied invasion in Normandy.

His last radio message to comrades was: ‘I’m going to put this thing down in a field.’

But the Australian’s plane then nose-dived into the sea and he was designated ‘missing believed killed’.

Now, however, the puzzle has been solved after locals spotted something sticking out of the mud in the Orne estuary near Caen at low tide and decided to investigate.

They could see only small parts of the legendary plane at the site, close to the D-Day landmarks of Sword Beach and Pegasus bridge.

But after staging a remarkable rescue operation they were astonished at how well preserved its fuselage and wooden propellor were. The dials on the instrument panel were still recognisable.

After the wreckage was towed ashore, the remains of Flight Lieutenant Smith were found in the cockpit. They were placed in a coffin and will be handed to the Australian Embassy in France today.

The pilot, known as Lacy to his friends, was one of the first pilots to land in France following the invasion of Europe. He was 27 when he was shot down on June 11, 1944.

The former textile worker had enlisted with the Royal Australian Air Force in May 1941.

He served with the RAAF’s 453 Squadron, motto ‘Ready to Strike’, which was part of RAF Fighter Command from June 1942, and married his English wife Edna the year before his death.

Official letters of condolence from his Squadron Leader, Donald Hamilton Smith, were sent to his widow in Bournemouth and to his father Richard in New South Wales, saying he was ‘lying in an unknown grave’.

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From Communities Washington Times

The Franklin Institute, a center for science education with hands-on exploration for children and adults presents “Cleopatra: The Search for the Last Queen of Egypt” through January 2, 2011.

The Franklin Institute is located in the Parkway Museum District is located in the City Center area were visitors will find Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Academy of Natural Sciences, the world class Rodin Museum, the main branch of the Free Library of Philadelphia, particularly important as Ben Franklin founded the first free library in Philadelphia (1731.)

The last great Pharoh of Egypt, Cleopatra lived from 69-30BC. Previously lost to the sands and the sea, her city and palace, built by Ptolmey II (300 B.C.) have been found in the Bay of Aboukir. Many artifacts found on the ocean floor from her royal palace as well as the lost city of Heraclieon and Canopus, the religious center of the region are now on display.

Imposing in their size and power are the two 16-foot tall figures of a Ptolemic King and Queen from the Temple of Amon at Heracleion, an ancient city near modern day Alexandria.

Making a search extending back 2,000 years in history even more difficult is that Egypt’s Roman conquerors attempted to rewrite history by destroying all evidence of her existence and her romances with both Julius Caesar and Mark Antony, assignations that were as much about romance as they were about aligning Egypt with political power.

Your visit starts with a brief movie, which introduces two men, Dr. Zahi Hawass, archaeologist and Secretary General of the Supreme Council of Antiquities and Franck Goddio, underwater archaeologist and director of IEASM. These explorers are looking beneath the sea and into the warm sands of Egypt seeking the final resting place of the elusive queen.

Stepping beyond what is believed to be a statute of Cleopatra’s body (the head is sadly missing) visitors walk into the ruins of ancient Alexandria and are able to see, quite closely, the very artifacts that once populated the Queens castle and court.

The presentation is as interesting and impactful as any I have seen. It is also reverently quiet as people listen to the personalized audio tour where the “voice” of Cleopatra narrates your journey centuries back in time.

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Photo Cory Morse

By Eric Gaertner - Muskegon Chronicle

A two-part program focused on shipwrecks, marine technology, scuba diving and underwater exploration is scheduled for Saturday at the Great Lakes Naval Memorial and Museum, 1346 Bluff.

Workshops on Remotely Operated Vehicles — unmanned, tethered vehicles that explore and work underwater — and four presentations on Great Lakes shipwrecks are planned for the event. 

Mark Gleason, the museum’s chief marine scientist and director of education, said the program is designed to provide the community “a better understanding of the underwater world.”

The program, called Shipwrecks and Robotics in the Great Lakes, is part of the museum’s push to reach out and serve the public.

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By Marcia Lane - St Augustine

Good thing it was after hours in the Flagler Hospital Imaging Center recently when technicians ran a couple of dozen items found in an 18th century shipwreck through the center's CAT scan.

"We were yelling," said Chuck Meide, archaeological director for the Lighthouse Archaeological Maritime Program. "It was one of those moments. A moment of discovery."

The discovery was a gentleman's pocket pistol concealed in a concretion, a concrete-like mass that forms around metal artifacts as they rust in the water.

"Our eyes were instantly drawn to (the pistol)," Meide said. The pistol was one of several items that ended "stuck" together. Other artifacts included a large iron spike, lots of small lead shot known as bird shot ("really, really tiny"), an iron hook, two ring-like objects and a disk of metal.

That disk of metal may be a coin and that would help date the wreck.

"People always seem to think shipwrecks and treasure, but it's very rare that's the case," Meide said. The ring-like objects aren't like finger rings. One is about an inch-and-a-half in diameter. The other has little curlicues on it and could be a bracelet or a drawer pull.

Finding the objects is one thing. Conserving them is another and one that takes considerable time. The pistol, for example, could take more than a year-and-a-half of work.

A number of other items were found in concretions taken from a shipwreck discovered by LAMP on the last day of the field season in 2009 and more fully explored this year. The scan revealed a pocket knife, navigational dividers for charting courses on maps ("They're pretty rare."), a possible pair of scissors and groups of nails and hooks.

"My gut reaction is that this appears the kind of cargo ... of items coming to supply St. Augustine. The preliminary interpretation is these are the kinds of things that would be needed in the 18th century. These kinds of things wouldn't have been manufactured here (then)," Meide said.

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By Sue Deschene - The Recorder and Times

Thanks to thousands of dollars raised, and at least as many hours of volunteer labour logged, a plaque now stands on Blockhouse Island to commemorate five shipwrecks resting at the bottom of the St. Lawrence River.

The Thousand Islands chapter of Save Ontario Shipwrecks (SOS) hosted its unveiling Saturday of a plaque to mark five sunken treasures in the Brockville area. This new plaque is located on the east side of Blockhouse Island, across from the canteen.

The plaque depicts five sunken ships -the Muscallonge, Robert Gaskin, J.B. King, Lillie Parsons and Henry C. Daryaw -on a locator map, along with a picture and information about each one. GPS co-ordinates are included for each shipwreck.

Project director Doug Miller spearheaded the committee of local volunteers who brought the plaque from its earliest planning stages to fruition.

"The first thing we did was a bunch of fundraising, and we set our sights on a land plaque," Miller recalled. "After we got all our ideas sorted out, then we went to Doug Grant, our graphic artist, and he came up with a design that helped it fit a lot of the other land plaques that we have."

Then the local SOS chapter approached the City of Brockville for permission to post the plaque on Blockhouse Island. The city agreed that once the plaque was erected, it would become city property, joining all the other heritage plaques maintained by the city.

"This is to let the general public know what all the excitement is about," Miller said. "They've prob-ably noticed that there's lots of divers in the area, but why are they coming to Brockville? Well, this tells them why."

"Most of our plaques are underwater," added Brian Prince, SOS past president and board member. "In the last few years, we've been putting up land plaques... to give the general public an appreciation of our marine heritage."

SOS had previously posted four other commemorative land plaques in eastern Ontario: Braeside (the Red Pine Bay Wreck), Prescott (the Rothesay) and Cardinal (the Conestoga and the Weehawk).

Save Ontario Shipwrecks is a provincial heritage organization dedicated to studying, preserv-ing and promoting an apprecia-tion of Ontario's marine heritage.The diving community plays a major role in the initiative.

Brockville has become a prime scuba-diving attraction thanks to its warm, crystal-clear waters, said Prince.

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By Allan Koay - The Star

This year marks the 100th anniversary of the birth of a pioneer who changed the world and its oceans forever.

The legendary Captain Jacques-Yves Cousteau originally planned to pursue a career in naval aviation. But a road accident dashed his hopes and he turned to the oceans instead.

Born in 1910 in Gironde, France, Cousteau graduated from the French Naval Academy as a gunnery officer. He started his underwater experiments even while in the navy. He worked in information service and was sent on missions to various countries in the late 1930s.

A few years after his marriage to Simone Melchior, World War II broke out and the couple and their two sons, Jean-Michel and Philippe, moved to Megeve where Cousteau met mountaineer Marcel Ichac.

Sharing a love for exploring the unknown, Cousteau and Ichac made the first French underwater film, 18 Metres Deep, shot by free-diving into the sea.

The film won a prize at the Congress Of Documentary Film in 1943. Also in that year, Cousteau, then 33, used a prototype of the aqualung which he had developed with French-Canadian engineer and inventor Emile Gagnan.

After undertaking various expeditions and an archaeological dive to a wreck in Tunisia, Cousteau left the navy in 1949. The next year he founded the French Oceanographic Campaigns, and leased the now-famous Calypso, retrofitting it with a laboratory.

Among the things he pioneered during his long career, Cousteau – along with Jean Molland – created the diving saucer, a mini-submersible that carries a crew of two and can go as deep as 350m. In the 1960s, another smaller, one-man version called the Sea Flea was created that could dive to a depth of 500m.

And while astronauts experimented with living in space stations, Cousteau had the vision of “oceanauts” living underwater for long periods. The Conshelf was created as a kind of “underwater village”. By 1965, the Conshelf III was born which could house up to six oceanauts for up to three weeks.

Cousteau also envisioned a propulsion system that partly uses clean renewable energy such as the wind, and the Turbosail was born. He also correctly predicted the sonar-like capabilities of dolphins when he noticed the movements of a group of porpoises that followed his research vessel.

Throughout his career, Cousteau made over 120 TV documentaries and wrote over 50 books. In 1956, his film, The Silent World, co-produced with a young Louis Malle, won the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival.

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