HOT NEWS !

By Grace Chung - The Star-Ledger

Two New Jersey divers sent waves throughout the wreck-diving community with the discovery of what is believed to the "bridge bell" from the historic shipwreck of the Andrea Doria, the luxury Italian ocean liner that sunk in 1953 off the coast of Nantucket, Massachusetts.

Ernest Rookey, of Jackson, and Carl Bayer, of Hillsborough, were part of an expedition team diving on the wreck when they made the find 240 feet below the ocean's surface.

Both men were diving the Andrea Doria for the first time as last minute fill-ins on the expedition after two other crew members dropped out.

“This is an incredibly significant find,” said expedition group leader, Joel Silverstein, of Arizona. “Think of it like finding a needle in a haystack.”

The bell, which weighs about 75lbs and stands two feet tall, is one of the few artifacts which has the ship’s name engraved on it.

The last major discovery was made when the stern bell was discovered by a group led by Gary Gentile in 1985, according to Silverstein.

The Andrea Doria, which was once considered Italy's flagship, has attracted thousands of divers since 1953, but most only go down one or two times "just to say that they went there,” said Silverstein.

Many consider it the Mount Everest of SCUBA diving because of the remote location and challenging conditions, Silverstein said.

Even among divers in the “core group” who have made multiple trips to the wreck, most only return with a few pieces of china, glassware, or portholes, said Silverstein, who has made 56 dives on the Andrea Doria wreck since 1992.

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From Cri English

A recently excavated tomb in Nanjing has been confirmed to be the grave of Zheng He, a eunuch from the early Ming Dynasty who led historic voyages to Southeast Asia and eastern Africa. The tomb was discovered accidentally on June 18th by workers at a construction site near Zutang Mountain that also holds the tombs of many other Ming Dynasty eunuchs, the Yangtse Evening News reported.

The tomb was 8.5 meters long and 4 meters wide and was built with blue bricks, which archaeologists said were only used in structures belonging to dignitaries during the time of Zheng He.

But experts believed his remains were not placed in the tomb because of the long distance between Nanjing and India, where he died during a visit in 1433.

Born in 1371, Zheng He was an excellent navigator and diplomat in the Ming Dynasty. He led the royal fleet to southwest Asia and east Africa on seven occasions from 1405 to 1433, nearly a century before Christopher Columbus discovered the American continent in 1492.

By Rossella Lorenzi - Discovey News

Amelia Earhart, the legendary pilot who disappeared 73 years ago while flying over the Pacific Ocean in a record attempt to fly around the world at the equator, may have survived several weeks, or even months as a castaway on a remote South Pacific island, according to preliminary results of a two-week expedition on the tiny coral atoll believed to be her final resting place.

"There is evidence on the island suggesting that a castaway was there for weeks and possibly months," Ric Gillespie, executive director of The International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery (TIGHAR), told Discovery News.

Gillespie has just returned from an expedition on Nikumaroro, the uninhabited tropical island in the southwestern Pacific republic of Kiribati where Earhart and her navigator Fred Noonan are believed to have landed when running out of fuel.

"We noticed that the forest can be an excellent source of water for a castaway in an island where there is no fresh water. After heavy rain, you can easily collect water from the bowl-shaped hollows in the buka trees.

We also found a campsite and nine fire features containing thousands of fish, turtle and bird bones. This might suggest that many meals took place there," Gillespie said.

TIGHAR's expedition to Nikumaroro was the tenth since 1989. During the previous campaigns, the team uncovered a number of artifacts which, combined with archival research, provide strong circumstantial evidence for a castaway presence.

"On this expedition we have recovered nearly 100 objects," Gillespie said. Among the items, 10 are being tested by a Canadian lab for DNA.

"We are talking about 'touch DNA,' genetic material that can be retrieved from objects that have been touched," he explained.

The best candidate for contact DNA appears to be a small glass jar that was found broken in five pieces, most likely a cosmetic jar.

Other candidates for DNA extraction include two buttons, parts of a pocket knife that was beaten apart to detach the blades for some reason, a cloth that appears to have been shaped as a bow, and cosmetic fragments of rouge from a woman's compact.

The excavation took place on the island's remote southeast end, in an area called the Seven Site, where the campsite and fire features were found.

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From The Associated Press

For almost 50 years a tugboat that once hauled barges between Vermont and New York on Lake Champlain has sat upright 160 feet underwater, hardly changed since the November night in 1963 when it ran aground on a reef and went down.

The paint on the William H. McAllister appears barely faded in recent video footage, and fire hoses remain coiled on the deckhouse walls. There's also a chance that the tug's fuel tanks still could be holding as much as 14,000 gallons of diesel fuel.

That has federal officials, environmentalists and residents who know about it concerned.

The threat of what could happen if those tanks were to fail and belch fuel into the 120-mile-long lake that separates Vermont and upstate New York drew an expedition last week of federal environmental officials and engineers to the lake.

They sent a remotely operated vehicle onto the McAllister to try to determine if there's fuel that could leak out.

"It's in such good condition after all these years," said Don Dryden, a commercial diver who was there to provide technical expertise about the condition of the tugboat for McAllister Towing and Transportation of New York, the successor to the company that owned the tug in 1963.

The federal Environmental Protection Agency will analyze last week's findings and perhaps send divers into the tug later this summer to determine how much fuel is in the tanks.

If necessary, the remaining fuel would be pumped out, said Paul Kahn, a coordinator for the EPA working at the scene.

By Randy Boswell - Canwest News Service

A stunningly well-preserved Lake Erie shipwreck — purported to be the Canadian-built brig Caledonia from the War of 1812 — has prompted visions of a world-class tourist attraction on the Buffalo shore and sparked a legal battle between New York's state government and a U.S. salvage company that wants to raise the vessel.

But could a 76-year-old issue of The Beaver — the venerable Canadian history magazine — scuttle the controversial dream?

A Buffalo-based maritime heritage centre is pointing to an article published in the magazine's December 1934 edition to question the identity of the sunken ship.

The article, written by the renowned Great Lakes historian George Cuthbertson, traces the careers of several fur trade vessels — including the 26-metre, two-masted Caledonia — that were put to military use in the War of 1812 and later sold off to private owners.

Cuthbertson details the Caledonia's remarkable role in the war, beginning with its secondment from the Northwest Company in 1812 to ferry British, Canadian and First Nations troops to Michilimackinac Island at the western end of Lake Huron, a strategic prize close to the eastern entrance of Lake Michigan.

Without a shot being fired, an American force surrendered the island's fort — an important event that dashed U.S. expectations of an easy triumph in the war and largely solidified aboriginal support behind the British.

The Caledonia later fell into American hands, then saw action in September 1813 — as the renamed USS Caledonia — in the Battle of Lake Erie, a famous U.S. victory in which much of the Royal Navy fleet on the Great Lakes was destroyed.

By Meg Jones - Journal Sentinel

For almost 112 years, the steamship rested in ghostly silence at the bottom of Lake Michigan, unknown and unseen until a group of divers kicked their way down to the deck and solved a perplexing maritime mystery.

The deck houses were gone, the smokestack was tipped over and a wheelbarrow used to move cargo lay on the boat's surface.

Though the name couldn't be seen on the stern, the length of the vessel and unusual characteristics pointed to only one ship - the L.R. Doty.

Until last week, it was the largest wooden ship that had been unaccounted for in Lake Michigan.

The 291-foot-long L.R. Doty was carrying a cargo of corn when it sank during a ferocious storm on Oct. 25, 1898. All 17 people aboard and the ship's two cats, Dewey and Watson, were lost.

When a group of divers and maritime historians discovered the L.R. Doty's grave about 20 miles off Oak Creek in 320 feet of water, they found an intact ship sitting upright.

It was in remarkable condition considering it's been underwater for more than a century, courtesy of the frigid waters of the Great Lakes that act as a great preservative of wooden ships.

And the cargo, harvested from Illinois farms and destined for Ontario, Canada, is still in the hold, though it now has a layer of muck on top of it, said Brendon Baillod, a Great Lakes maritime historian who spearheaded the search.

"She vanished with no real explanation. She was a pretty new ship. We wanted to solve that mystery - why she disappeared in a Lake Michigan storm that she should have been able to handle," Baillod said Wednesday.

Built in 1893, the L.R. Doty was in the largest class of wooden vessels in existence on the Great Lakes at a time when the maritime highway was equivalent to today's interstate system. It was built with steel arches embedded in the hull, which provided extra stability, one reason its captain might have felt confident heading into bad weather.

Technical divers - breathing a special blend of mixed gas with equipment required to dive so far deep - shot video of the wreck site and snapped photos that give clues that could explain how and why the Doty sank in a storm so fierce it damaged part of the Milwaukee break wall and destroyed the boardwalk in Chicago.

By Terry Pender - The Record

More than 150 artifacts from the world’s most famous shipwreck are coming to town for a four-month show.

Titanic: The Artifact Exhibit will run at The Museum, 10 King St. W., from Sept. 23 to Jan. 23.

“When I looked inside the cases at some of the artifacts it truly is — it really makes you stop,” David Marskell, the museum’s executive director, said in an interview Wednesday. “It is an amazing story that has endured for a hundred years.”

This will be the largest exhibit yet staged at The Museum and it expects to set a new attendance record.

RMS Titanic Inc. salvaged more than 5,500 artifacts from the wreckage during seven recovery expeditions to the North Atlantic from 1987 to 2004.

The company’s small submarines gathered a bewildering array of artifacts, ranging from a 17-ton section of the hull to a child’s small marble. Using the artifacts and recreating many of the ship’s rooms, the exhibit tells the story of the ship from its conception and construction to its fateful voyage and its demise on April 14-15, 1912.

Marskell toured the exhibit at the Science Centre in Louisville, Ky., and knew right away he wanted it for The Museum.

“You see a perfume bottle or a pair of shoes or plates that didn’t shatter, it is tough to comprehend what happened, that it was under the ocean so many miles down and now they are coming to Kitchener,” Marskell said.

By Susan Cocking - Miami Herald.com

The retired Boeing 727 jetliner was billed as the jewel of Miami-Dade's thriving artificial reef program.

But almost as soon as the "Spirit of Miami" was scuttled 17 years ago, vandals unbolted steel cables attaching it to the bottom of Biscayne Bay and made off with souvenirs. Tropical Storm Gordon snapped it into pieces in 1995. 

Rolling free on the sandy bottom, the pieces scattered, and the reef that had been sunk with national fanfare disappeared, pretty much forgotten -- until now.

As workers from the Miami-Dade Department of Environmental Resources Management (DERM) checked possible locations for new artificial reefs earlier this spring with laser-assisted depth-sound equipment, they found ``a couple of blips we had not seen before,'' said Steve Blair, chief of the agency's restoration and enhancement section.

In a follow-up dive, they discovered three pieces of the Spirit of Miami: a part of the tail section lying on its side, a portion of the fuselage and a piece of the wing.

The remains lie in the sand 110 feet deep, about 500 feet northeast of the original deployment site three miles off Key Biscayne. Several other artificial reefs, including the Ophelia Brian sunk last December, lie nearby.

"That wreck put diving in Miami on the map," said Stephen O'Neal, owner of the Miami salvage company that supplied the plane. "It's exciting talking about it after all these years."

The pieces of the wreck are now covered with soft corals and dotted with spiny oysters that snap their shells closed when divers approach, as a group discovered on a recent dive with Capt. Mike Beach of the Big Com-Ocean dive boat based at Miami Beach Marina.