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From gCaptain

What became of Amelia Earhart’s plane when it disappeared over the Pacific 75 years ago has long intrigued aviation fans.

On Tuesday, U.S. government officials and a private historical group are expected to announce a new effort to locate the famed aviator’s twin-engine Lockheed.

The effort, projected to kick off in July, will be financed with roughly half a million dollars in private funds, according to people familiar with the details.

It will focus on a remote Pacific atoll called Nikumaroro, halfway between Hawaii and Australia, near where the plane carrying Earhart and a companion may have gone down during an attempted around-the-world flight.

A search team will concentrate on the deep waters near Nikumaroro, which was the site of a 2010 search that focused on coral reefs and nearby shallow waters, these people said.

The search will be spearheaded again by the International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery, which has championed the theory that the renowned female aviator and Fred Noonan, the other crew member on the July 1937 flight, ended up on or near the west coast of the island, formerly called Gardner Island.

Aviation experts aren’t unanimous in believing that scenario, and officials from the private recovery team declined to comment about specifically where they intend to look and who is financing the expedition.

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From gCaptain

Avatar, Titanic, & The Abyss director James Cameron’s newest plan is to charge down to the bottom of the 35,800-foot-deep Marianas Trench near Guam.

The only people who have ever been to the bottom of the Marianas Trench are Jacques Piccard and US Navy Captain Don Walsh. 

They chilled on the bottom for 20 minutes, saw a flounder and a shrimp and not much else as their vessel kicked up a ton of silt from the bottom.

The first expedition to the bottom of the Marianas Trench took 5 hours of descending to reach the bottom. James plans on reaching the bottom in 90 minutes.

James has already tested his submarine in a nearby trench and he went 5.1 miles down. He was blown away by the jellyfish, tube worms, and sea anemones he saw. That dive was the deepest solo submarine dive ever.

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From Paul Fraser Collectibles

Photographs of Captain Scott's tragic expedition to the south pole are set to auction at Bonhams in London later in the month.

Herbert Ponting's documentation of the 1910-1913 expedition will go under the hammer on March 30 to mark the 99^th anniversary of Captain Scott's death.

An album of 68 images is expected to achieve around £40,000, in addition to a number of single photographs which have valuations ranging from £600 to £8,000.

The photographs offer a haunting record of the expedition, which successfully reached the south pole, but some five weeks after Norwegian rival Amundsen.

The five-man party failed to return, as frostbite, hunger and exhaustion overtook them. Ponting's photographs document 14 months at Cape Evans, between 1911 and 1912, where the expedition prepared for the march on the pole.

He left the expedition in February 1912 along with eight others, as the rest of the party headed further south.

From My Fox Tampa Bay

A federal judge was considering Friday whether to force Florida deep-sea explorers to hand over to Spain the last of the treasure they recovered from a 200-year-old shipwreck.

Spanish military planes flew home with nearly 600,000 silver coins and other artifacts

after prevailing in a five-year legal battle over ownership with Tampa-based Odyssey Marine Exploration. Now, Spain wants the rest of it -- specifically some artifacts that Odyssey left behind in Gibraltar when it flew the coins to the United States in May 2007.

The artifacts include at least 100 silver coins, personal effects of sailors and ship equipment, said James Goold, a Washington attorney who represents the Spanish government.

In a federal court filing, Spain has asked that Odyssey be forced to hand over the remainder of the booty from the frigate Nuestra Senora de Las Mercedes, which was sunk by British warships in 1804. 

During a two-hour long hearing in federal court Friday morning, Goold asked U.S. Magistrate Judge James Pizzo to order Odyssey to turn the treasure in Gibraltar over to Spain and for Odyssey to pay for Spain's fees and court costs over the issue. The judge did not indicate when he might rule on the matter. 

Goold also questioned some alleged discrepancies in the documented inventory of what is in a storage crate in Gibraltar. He said the judge could hold Odyssey in contempt of court.;

"Gibraltar has been used to hide critical evidence in this case," Goold said. "We need to figure out what's what."

But Odyssey's lawyer said the explorers haven't been hiding anything. Melinda MacConnel said Odyssey has not been able to properly inventory the storage crate for years, in part because Spain intervened in the case.

MacConnel said all of the treasure from Nuesta Senora de Las Mercedes was brought to Gibraltar, and the bulk of it then was sent to Florida -- all except the crate in question, which contains the coins and other miscellaneous items.

From RT

The US Navy has confirmed it is doubling the number of minesweepers in the Persian Gulf in an apparent move to prepare for a possible standoff with Iran over the crucial oil export route.

An additional four minesweeper and four minesweeping helicopters will join the four ships already patrolling the Persian Gulf.

The overall number of US minesweepers in the region will total eight, America’s head of naval operations Admiral Jonathan Greenert reported.

While saying sanctions and political measures are preferable to respond to Iran’s controversial nuclear program, looks like the US is getting ready for plan B.

The US has been working of an array of military measures to counteract Iran, with President Obama saying “no options are off the table.”

The Pentagon has recently asked for an additional $100 million dollars to beef up its military presence in the Persian Gulf.

About one fifth of the world’s oil passes through The Strait of Hormuz.

Earlier Tehran promised to block the primary route of oil exports from the region in retaliation to new US and EU-backed sanctions against the Islamic Republic.

In January, General Martin Dempsey, the Chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, confirmed Iran indeed has the ability to block the Strait of Hormuz “for a period of time,” and the US must get ready to reopen it in case of a blockade.

From MSNBC

Underwater thieves have evaded an array of laser systems that measure millimetric shifts in the Costa Concordia shipwreck and 24-hour surveillance by the Italian coast guard and police to haul off a symbolic booty - the ship's bell.

The giant cruise liner capsized off the Tuscan island of Giglio after hitting a rock on January 13, killing at least 25 people. Seven people are still unaccounted for.

Prosecutors have accused Captain Francesco Schettino of causing the accident by bringing the multi-storey Costa Concordia, which was carrying more than 4,200 passengers and crew, too close to the shore.

Now prosecutors have opened an investigation to find out who filched the modern-day Titanic's bell.

Judicial sources said on Thursday thieves nabbed the ship's bell more than two weeks ago from one of the decks of the Costa Concordia, which is submerged in 8 meters (26 feet) of water.

Investigators suspect more than one person was involved in stealing the heavy bell, etched with the ship's name and 2006, the year it was christened.

Ships bells were traditionally used to signal half-hour intervals in a four-hour watch.

By Jessica Dickler - WPBF

The most famous shipwreck of all time is on the auction block, including passengers' personal belongings and even salvage rights to the wreck site at the bottom of the North Atlantic Sea.

The collection includes video footage of the ship and recovery effort, as well as more than 5,500 artifacts recovered from the wreck. The artifacts consist of fine china, silverware, clothing, diamond jewelry and other personal items, decorative items from the boat, and even pieces of the ship itself.

The auction, near the shipwreck's centennial, marks the first time artifacts collected from the Titanic during salvage expeditions will be available for sale, although items gathered from the ocean surface or from survivors have been sold in the past -- for a pricey sum.

In 2004, Guernsey's auctioned off memorabilia from the Titanic and a few artifacts that had been passed down through the families of survivors from the ship. An original menu sold for about $100,000, according to Arlan Ettinger, president of Guernsey's auction house in New York.

All the artifacts and intellectual property in this auction will be sold as a single lot by Guernsey's.

In a previous appraisal, the collection was valued at $189 million altogether. There will be a reserve, although it has not been disclosed, Ettinger said.

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Garret Ellison - Mlive

A little bit of Imperial China is up for grabs in West Michigan this week.

Starting today, a collection of porcelain Ming and Qing Dynasty artifacts salvaged about 20 years ago from a shipwreck in the South China Sea is available for the public to view at Auction Michigan LLC in Wyoming.

The seventeen pieces come from an unidentified, foreign-born collector who was present when they were brought up from the bottom, said Soneya O’Bryant, with Auction Michigan, located at 4393 Clay Ave. SW.

The business, started in 2011, is owned by Jason Stount. This is its first fine art auction.

Online bidding for the pottery collection began last week, but interested parties can view them at the auction house until Thursday, when the bidding closes.

The pieces come from an unnamed shipwreck, said O’Bryant. The vessel was exporting porcelain and other goods during the Qing Dynasty, the last imperial Chinese dynasty which ruled from 1644 to 1911, immediately preceding the Republic of China.

The pieces likely originated in Changnanzhen, later renamed Jindezheng — aka the "Porcelain Capital" — which has been a global center of pottery production for 1,700 years, said Peter L. Combs, an Asian art dealer in Gloucester, Mass., and past partner at Landry Auctions.

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