HOT NEWS !

From San Francisco Chronicle

Odyssey Marine Exploration Inc., the ocean salvager featured in the Discovery Channel series "Treasure Quest," is trying to recover silver valued at as much as $260 million by October from a ship torpedoed by a Nazi submarine in 1941.

The Tampa, Florida-based company was awarded a contract by the U.K. government last year that would allow it to keep about 80 percent of the bullion treasure of the S.S. Gairsoppa, a cargo steamer sunk by a German U-boat off the Irish coast. There's an estimated 4 million to 7 million ounces at the shipwreck site, according to Odyssey President and Chief Operating Officer Mark Gordon.

"This is the year we're going to go out and find it," Gordon said in an interview. He said the cost of the search would be less than $10 million. "The total survey and recovery costs will be a fraction of the value," Gordon said.

Odyssey aims to salvage Gairsoppa's cargo from beneath as much as 14,000 feet (4,270 meters) of water amid surging prices for silver, which has more than doubled in the past year, and gold, which rose to a record last week.

The company recovered 17 tons of gold and silver coins in 2007 in an Atlantic Ocean operation it codenamed Black Swan.

It also plans to hoist treasure from at least five other ships, including HMS Sussex, which sank in 1694 near Gibraltar and may hold gold that the New York Times has estimated is valued at as much as $4 billion.

"We've got a buy rating on the stock; it's what we call a big idea," Mark Argento, a Minneapolis-based analyst at Craig- Hallum Capital Group LLC, said in a telephone interview. "It's got biotech-type returns without the massive upfront capital. The next few months should prove interesting."

Odyssey climbed 32 cents, or 12 percent, to $3.06 at 4:30 p.m. in Nasdaq Stock Market composite trading. The shares have more than doubled in the past 12 months.

Odyssey's other salvaging targets include HMS Victory, which sank off England in 1744 carrying 100,000 ounces of gold, and the Enigma, Shantaram and Firebrand, three merchant ships estimated to have cargoes worth at least $50 million each, Gordon said.

"We're probably the most excited we have ever been," Gordon said of the 17-year-old salvaging company that was featured in the Discovery series in 2009. "We have more projects at relatively late stages than we've ever had in the history of the company."

Depending on the weather, hunting for the Gairsoppa may start as early as May using sonar, metal detectors and undersea robots, Gordon said. The wreck's condition will help determine how quickly the cargo can be extracted, he said.

Odyssey has also signed deals to mine the South Pacific sea floor. Companies such as Nautilus Minerals Inc., Neptune Minerals Plc and an AngloGold Ashanti Ltd. joint venture are seeking gold, copper and silver deposits with technology adapted from deep-water oil exploration.

By Jim Hayden - The Holland Sentinel

Researchers have found the shipwreck of what could be one of the oldest vessels in southern Lake Michigan.

Underwater video of this new discovery will be shown at the annual Mysteries and Histories Beneath the Inland Seas event at 7 p.m. Saturday, April 16, at the Knickerbocker Theatre in Holland.

Holland-based Michigan Shipwreck Research Associates made the discovery of the 60-foot, single-masted sloop dating back to perhaps the 1830s in deep water between Saugatuck and South Haven. The group was working in collaboration with author Clive Cussler and his sonar operator Ralph Wilbanks of the National Underwater & Marine Agency.

During an exploratory dive to the 250-foot deep wreck, the research group made note of three features that are significantly different from sailing vessels dating to the mid- and late-19th-century: the lack of a centerboard, the presence of a raised afterdeck and deadlights (a pair of openings) in the stern that allowed light to reach the cargo hold.

The shipwreck group’s historians have verified that the vessel’s construction and design is consistent with ships built in the 1820s and 1830s, making it perhaps one of the oldest vessels discovered in the southern basin of Lake Michigan. The vessel sits upright and is in good condition considering it was built nearly 200 years ago.


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From Dominican Today

Discover the endless underwater world of the Dominican Republic (DR), a diver's paradise with nearly 1,000 miles of breathtaking coastline that features colorful marine life and intriguing shipwrecks from when pirates sailed the Caribbean.

Located roughly 800 miles south of Miami, the DR boasts numerous sea grass beds, vibrant coral reefs, mysterious underwater caves and some of the region's most unique sea creatures.

Simply put, divers should expect the unexpected.

"We are a top-notch diving destination amid turquoise waters so clear and blue one has to see to believe. The DR offers diverse marine life, excellent certified diving schools and accessible dive sites along our amazing coasts," said Magaly Toribio, DR Ministry of Tourism Vice Minister of International Promotion.

"The DR has it all with developed tourist areas boasting world-class hotels and more off-the-beaten-path options for adventurous, independent divers."

With the Atlantic Ocean on the north and the Caribbean Sea on the south, the following underwater treasures await you in the DR:

The DR's Southcentral Coast is home to illuminating coral, technicolor fish, an underwater national park, mysterious caverns and is well-suited for both beginner and experienced divers.

East of capital city Santo Domingo near Boca Chica, La Caleta Underwater National Park delights beginners and experienced divers alike at 600 square miles and 600 feet deep.

With fascinating reef and wreck diving, La Caleta is known for attracting multicolor fish and the park will soon introduce the first underwater museum of submerged Dominican themed sculptures.

Nearby, divers can explore the 69 foot wreck of tugboat El Limon embedded with coral reefs and 144 foot wreck of Hickory, surrounded by hundreds of yellow tube sponge clusters that swim among this treasure salvage vessel.

Also hidden in the DR's southern waters is El Catuan, a sunken ship buried 60 feet underwater, and Barracuda Reef, a natural underwater mountain thriving with barracudas. Here you will discover mysterious underwater caves like Cueva Taina, El Hipodromo and El Tildo.

More adventurous divers can explore the DR's extreme southern coastal area near Barahona-Pedernales. This less-traveled coast features warmer waters and well-protected dives due to the reef structures and coastal curve.

With a wealth of marine life, the DR's Southeast Coast has one of the Caribbean's largest sunken ships, the 266 foot long St. George, where you may come face to face with grouper, barracudas, dolphins, morays, and mackerel, to name a few.

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By Randy Boswell - Postmedia News

Conservation specialists have rediscovered the soundtrack of a deadly shipwreck from the Klondike Gold Rush, identifying three records found with a vintage phonograph alongside the sunken sternwheeler A.J. Goddard, which went down in a storm more than a century ago on Yukon's fabled Lake Laberge.

The exquisitely-preserved wreck of the Goddard — discovered in 2009 by a Yukon government-led team of Canadian and American archeologists — has been hailed as a "time capsule" from the era in which tens of thousands of fortune-seekers from across North America rushed to the remote, northwest corner of Canada following the discovery of gold nuggets in streams near present-day Dawson City.

The phonograph used aboard the Goddard — a steam-powered vessel that transported miners to the goldfields up the Yukon River — was considered the most exciting of artifacts found at the wreck site.

Though damaged from spending more than a century at the bottom of Lake Laberge — a widening of the river and the setting for Klondike poet Robert Service's ghoulish 1907 masterwork The Cremation of Sam McGee — the records were carefully retrieved from the chilly depths and sent to Ottawa for analysis and preservation by experts with the Canadian Conservation Institute (CCI), a federal agency that studies and protects the country's most coveted historical relics.

"The recovered artifacts reveal intimate details of life on a small, functional Yukon sternwheeler," Yukon's tourism and culture minister, Elaine Taylor, said recently in announcing the institute's findings.

"To have the opportunity to learn about the music those on the Goddard would have enjoyed gives us a window into Yukon's past and one small piece of the culture of the day."

The CCI's lead researcher on the project, senior conservator Tara Grant, told Postmedia News that part of the thrill of studying the items was the fact that "almost no one has seen a record come out of an archeological site.

They were probably playing it when the ship went down."

By Rachael Recker - The Grand Rapids Press

The Grand Rapids Public Museum is bringing the stories and artifacts of the 20th century's most infamous sunken ship to the Great Lakes State for its maiden Michigan voyage.

Premier Exhibitions' “Titanic: The Artifact Exhibition” will make its Michigan debut, said the museum's spokesperson, Rebecca Westphal, in November in 2012 – the year that marks the 100th anniversary of the vessel's sinking.

Historically, the month also is the most turbulent and dangerous for ships on the Great Lakes. The SS Edmund Fitzgerald, Michigan's infamous shipwreck, sank in a storm on Nov. 10, 1975.

“We realize we might be a little early out with this, but we're pretty excited,” said Westphal, director of marketing, communications and customer service at the museum. “It's an exhibit that really takes you to another place in time. It really brings (the wreck) to a personal level in many ways.”

The blockbuster exhibition, already seen by millions, will be featured in the museum's 7,500-square-foot Lacks Gallery.

Visitors will enter the exhibit with a male or female boarding pass, giving details about a particular person's life who was aboard the White Star Line's R.M.S. Titanic on its fateful maiden voyage – who they were, why they were traveling, whether they were first class or steerage or if anybody was traveling with them.

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National Maritime Museum

By Wynne Parry - LiveScience

In 1845, two ill-fated British ships headed for the Canadian Arctic in the hope of discovering the Northwest Passage to the Pacific Ocean. More than two decades later, the nearly complete skeleton of one of the explorers was recovered from a shallow, stone-covered grave on King William Island in the Canadian Arctic.

The remains were then identified as those of Henry Le Vesconte, a lieutenant aboard one of the ships, the HMS Erebus. However, a modern analysis points to another identity for the man.

Whoever he was, this man appears to have died early and so escaped the worst.

"That the body was accorded formal burial suggests that the death occurred before the final throes of the expedition when the dead seem to have been left unburied and, in some cases, cannibalized," write lead researcher Simon Mays of English Heritage, an organization that advises the government on historic issues, and colleagues in the Journal of Archaeological Science.

The grave, then believed to be Le Vesconte's, was first discovered by native Inuits who later led an American adventurer to it. The body was returned to England, analyzed and buried beneath the Franklin Memorial in Greenwich. (Sir John Franklin led the expedition.)

In 2009, renovations to the monument required that the body be exhumed, creating the opportunity to apply modern forensic techniques.

This wasn't the first time. In the 1980s, a team led by Canadian researcher Owen Beattie studied the remains of three men who also died early during that expedition and were buried in the permafrost on Beechey Island.

Lead levels in these men's tissues were high, as they were among the scattered remains found there, leading to speculation that lead poisoning, possibly from poorly canned foods, had contributed to their deaths.

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From Huddersfield Daily Examiner

He has been working in the murky seas around Britain’s coast for 25 years. But now commercial diver Sean Ryan, of Huddersfield, has struck gold – quite literally!

The 45-year-old from Crosland Moor has found a hoard of buried treasure. Okay, it may not be a rotting wooden chest full of gold doubloons and goblets.

But the haul of coins, cutlery and medals he uncovered 120 metres down on the sea bed of the English Channel is worth a few thousand pounds.

And it brought a touch of excitement to the daily life of Sean, who is working on a seabed exploration project for an oil company.

Some of the coins he brought to the surface are thought to be Victorian, while other material salvaged includes several gold rings, brooches and pins.

Intriguingly, there was also a medal inscribed to the Yorkshire Riflemen, who were predecessors of the Prince of Wale’s Own regiment of Yorkshire, now part of the Yorkshire Regiment.

“It was a wonderful moment” said Sean, of Crosland Moor.

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From English People Daily

Thirteen professionals have arrived at the Maritime Silk Road Museum of Guangdong Province and are preparing for the second indoor trial excavation of the sunken vessel "Nanhai No. 1," according to announcement made by the museum on March 21. The excavation is expected to last for around one month.

The second trial excavation will be carried out on the bow and stern of the ship and will verify which end is indeed the bow and stern. According to sources, the excavation will further perfect the indoor underwater archaeological parameters and make preparations for the full excavation plan.

Bu Gong, a researcher from the Guangdong Provincial Institute of Cultural Relics and Archaeology (GPICRA) and the consultant for the second excavation, disclosed that the period of the 12th Five-Year Plan is a golden period for the full excavation of the sunken ship, but the first thing that must be done is to finish the plan for the full excavation. Therefore, the information acquired from this excavation will be very important.

Liu Zhiyuan, the vice director of the GPICRA's Underwater Department and the team leader of the second excavation, told the press that this excavation will be open to the public for the first time. Visitors at the museum will be able to watch the entire process of the archaeological excavation.

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