HOT NEWS !

By Jim Hayden - The Holland Sentinel

Divers looking for shipwrecks don’t often make a significant find before their feet even get wet, but history is always full of surprises.

The group Michigan Shipwreck Research Associates recently received the 8-foot-long nameplate for the Andaste, the ship the divers will be looking for off the coast of Port Sheldon later this week.

“I don’t think there can be anything more important to show it’s proof positive from the ship,” said group Director Valerie van Heest about the wood with the lead letters of the ship’s name.

The name plate was discovered by Bud Gebben’s father just days after the ship sank in September 1929.

“He was very proud of it,” said Gebben of his father, Gerald, who died two years ago at the age of 89.

The Gebben family owned a store in Port Sheldon at the time. Gerald sailed his family’s sailboat out of Pigeon Lake a few days after the disappearance of the freighter.

In shallow water between the sandbars, he found the planking from the upper pilothouse on which the lead letters were screwed.

“It’s something my dad always talked about,” said Gebben.

The elder Gebben displayed the artifact until his death.

“We were cleaning his house and rather than throwing it away, we wanted to find a permanent home for it,” said Gebben, 65, who lives in Holland.

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BY Jannette Pippin - JD News.com

The latest efforts to preserve artifacts from the shipwreck presumed to be Queen Anne’s Revenge never left the sea floor.

Staff from the N.C. Underwater Archaeology Branch conducted a three-day expedition at the QAR site this week and focused on a new “in situ” method of conservation that begins the process while artifacts are still on the ocean’s bottom.

Skinny aluminum rods called sacrificial anodes were attached to several anchors and a cannon to change the electrochemical process that corrodes iron in saltwater, reducing or even reversing the amount of salts absorbed by the iron objects, said QAR Project Director Mark Wilde Ramsing.

He said they’ve tested the process and it seems to be working. And by beginning conservation under water, they can potentially save time and space at the conservation lab.

In the lab, it can take up to five years to remove salts from a large cannon using electrolysis.

“Hopefully this will reduce the time by several years,” Wilde Ramsing said. “It’s a fairly experimental and if nothing else, it will help to stop the artifacts from continuing to corrode.”

During the expedition, the QAR team was also filmed by a French crew doing a documentary about pirates.

Wilde Ramsing said they are now looking ahead to a push to get all the artifacts out of the water, properly preserved and ready for public display. Backing the efforts are a new Friends of QAR, a nonprofit organization established to provide funding for the shipwreck project, and a new strategic plan for moving the project toward its end goal.

Wilde Ramsing said N.C. Department of Cultural Resources Secretary Linda Carlisle has declared an initiative to get all the shipwreck’s artifacts up over the next four years.

With a fall dive planned for this year, they are looking at finishing field work by 2013, he said.

From The Jakarta Post

The much-awaited auction of more than 270,000 pieces of 11 century-old artifacts retrieved from a shipwreck in Cirebon and the recent finding of 12,400 items of ancient Chinese ceramics in neighboring Subang waters only confirms the country’s rich in undersea treasures, which may have long been overlooked.

There are an estimated 3 million undiscovered shipwrecks spread across the oceans, including in Indonesian waters, tempting maritime treasure hunters to dive deep in the sea for a bounty.

The price tag of the auctioned historical items has been set at US$80 million, and with the proceeds to be evenly shared between the government and the finders, including Belgian Luc Heymans’ Cosmix Underwater Research Ltd., it can be imagined how lucrative the industry is.

An Australian underwater treasure hunter who was recently declared a fugitive by the police for illegal salvage work of Chinese artifacts in Subang reportedly made $17 million from gold ingots and Chinese porcelain salvaged from a wreck found off the Riau Islands in the 1980s alone.

German treasure hunter Klaus Keppler, who has been operating in Indonesia for years, says the business is risky as evident in the fact he has searched about 70 wrecks, but only five are probably worth it. He has earned big, however, including from his recovery of a 10th century wreck and a 19th century British vessel that ran aground Indonesian waters.

The foreign hunters will continue to take advantage of Indonesia’s limited technology, equipment and lack of interest to excavate more treasures lying beneath the sea. Given the fact that Indonesia was a prominent route of international trade linking Asia, the Middle East and Europe in the past, the industry is indeed a money machine.

It remains unclear how much the industry has contributed to state revenue as there have been no official reports on undersea treasure findings, except from media coverage. Nobody knows either the amount of potential income from unreported discoveries as a result of limited maritime patrols and the government’s control.

The price Indonesia may have to pay for allowing the business to flourish, however, may exceed the proceeds. As the UNESCO has put it, the sales of ancient artifacts salvaged from the sea may cause Indonesia to lose valuable heritage of the past civilization.

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From Bernama

The Indonesian government is planning to build a maritime museum in Jakarta in a bid to save the treasure, artifacts and valuable goods retrieved from the old sunken ships in Indonesia's waters, a minister said Monday.

"We have planned to build a museum, in particular, to store the valuable goods retrieved from many of ships sunk hundreds of years ago in our waters," Indonesian Maritime and Fisheries Minister Fadel Muhammad was quoted by the Antara news agency as saying after opening an oceanography conference in Bali.

The minister said that the Indonesian government would contact officials in the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) regarding the plan.

Fadel said that Indonesia's waters have treasures and artifacts from sunken ships that were operated by Arabian, Chinese traders and the Dutch colonial administrator that ruled the country a hundred years ago.

Now, plenty of treasures and valuable artifacts are placed in several museums across the country, according to the minister.

"The would-be built maritime museum would gather all of those things and display for the public," he said.

An Indonesian agency tasked to retrieve those artifacts and treasures found valuable earthenware, ceramics from Chinese and Arabian trading ships that sank in waters off Cirebon, West Java recently, reports said.

From AAP

She never completed her maiden voyage, but the Titanic's treasures are travelling the world.

Already seen by 22 million people in 72 cities in the United States and Europe, Titanic: The Artefact Exhibition features more than 280 treasures that lay deep in the North Atlantic Sea for 73 years inside one of the most luxurious liners ever constructed.

There is an imposing steel first class "D" deck door originally mounted to the hull through which passengers would hurry to reserve the best tables in the dining room. Chamber pots sit beside chandeliers, gold watches alongside wool socks. 

Visitors can enter the recreated spaces of the Grand Staircase, and accommodation from the first- and third-class cabins. There is also an iceberg for the intrepid to touch. 

US-based RMS Titanic (RMST) has made seven expeditions to the shipwreck site since 1987, amassing more than 5,500 pieces for restoration and preservation.

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By Betty Klinck - USA Today

Part of the story is solid. Part of it remains a mystery.

What is certain is that on the night of Feb. 17, 1864, the Confederate submarine H.L. Hunley sank the USS Housatonic in Charleston Harbor in South Carolina to become the first submarine to sink a ship during combat.

Then the Hunley itself literally sank into oblivion when it went down with its crew of eight. The resting place of the Civil War submarine, which had remained a mystery for more than century, finally was discovered in 1995 off Sullivan's Island.

But before the submarine sank, the story goes, it flashed a blue light to Confederate soldiers on the shore to signal success.

But as this part of the story comes from second- and third-hand accounts, it "gets a little fuzzy," says archaeologist Mike Scafuri of the Warren Lasch Conservation Center in Charleston, where the recovered Hunley is on display.

Nobody knows whether the signal was supposed to be made directly after the attack or as the Hunley approached shore, Scafuri says. And another question remains: Could a lantern have produced a strong enough light for the soldiers to see?

To try to answer the question of the mysterious blue signal, 12 students at Hamburg (Pa.) Area High School are building three replicas of the submarine's lantern in the school's metal shop.

Retired history teacher Ned Eisenhuth and retired shop teacher Fred Lutkis began the project after expressing interest last summer in the history of the Hunley to the Lasch Conservation Center. Before they retired, Eisenhuth and Lutkis had worked with students at Minersville (Pa.) Area High School to create replicas of a Viking burial sled and a medieval cart.

These will be the only true replicas of the Hunley's lantern, Eisenhuth says. Next month, the school plans to donate the best replica of the lantern to the conservation center, which has been studying the submarine since it was excavated in 2000 with help from the Friends of the Hunley Organization.

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By Jennifer Ouellette - Discovery News

You wouldn't think a sunken ship from 2000 years ago could hold the key to the success of a neutrino detection experiment, except perhaps in a Hollywood movie, or a NOVA special on Jacques Cousteau. But sometimes truth really is stranger than fiction.

Scientists with the Cryogenic Underground Observatory for Rare Events (CUORE), a neutrino observatory buried under the Gran Sasso mountain in Italy, hit the mother load when archaeologists discovered a Spanish ship off the coast of Sardinia, filled with lead that dates back two millennia.

Yes, lead. Really, really old lead. That might not seem very exciting to you, but for CUORE scientists, it's a godsend. They use lead (also copper) as a shielding material for their neutrino detection materials.

See, neutrinos -- dubbed "ghost particles" because they so rarely interact with everything (billions course through you every second) -- are extremely difficult to detect, in part because their signals can be obscured by things like cosmic rays, and the natural radioactivity in rocks, for example.

CUORE is looking for an even rarer event, known as neutrinoless double-beta decay. Among other things, such an observation would provide a handy means of directly calculating the mass of a neutrino (which is very, very small -- so small that for decades physicists believed neutrinos had no mass).

Alas, there are also trace amounts of radioactivity in the very materials that are supposed to shield the experiments from interference -- the radioactive isotope lead-210, in the case of contemporary lead ingots.

But if you have lead that is 2000 years old, that radioactive isotope has pretty much disappeared.

Unfortunately, lead that old is quite a rare find. US scientists working on the IGEX experiment lucked out a few years ago when they snagged from 450-year-old lead from a sunken Spanish galleon.

By Putri Prameshwari - Jakarta Globe

The government is revising its bidding procedures for a cache of salvaged historical artifacts, following last week’s aborted auction that had aimed to raise $80 million but failed to get a single bid, an official at the maritime affairs ministry said on Sunday.

The auction flop has polarized the debate on whether such items are too valuable, historically, to be sold off.

Aji Sularso, director general of supervision at the Maritime Affairs and Fisheries Ministry, said officials would meet on Monday to discuss alternative procedures for the auction of 271,000 pieces of ceramics and jewelry recovered from a shipwreck off Cirebon, West Java.

“Having learned from the first auction, we’re evaluating the procedures for the next one,” he said.

Wednesday’s auction of 10th-century treasures was called off after five minutes because there were no bidders. The ministry had required a deposit of $16 million for the right to bid, about 20 percent of the minimum amount it sought to raise.

“We’ll probably be more flexible on the deposit,” Aji said.

He added that another problem was that the auction had been announced at short notice, giving potential bidders only a week to register and submit their deposits. Aji said an overhaul of the bidding procedure would be crucial to enabling the ministry to auction off more such items within the country, rather than through auction houses elsewhere. 

Indonesian waters, historically busy shipping lanes, are believed to house numerous wrecks carrying valuable cargo. Aji put the number at more than 480. The Cirebon haul was recovered by Belgian salvager Luc Heymans’ Cosmix Underwater Research and its local partner, PT Paradigma Putra Sejahtera. 

Paradigma CEO Adi Agung Tirtamarta welcomed further discussions with the ministry on loosening up the bidding procedure.

“It’ll be good for Indonesia to get its hands on treasures found in its own waters,” he said, adding that in the past such finds were looted and taken overseas.

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