HOT NEWS !

By Shawn J. Soper


A large section of what is likely a fairly ancient wooden vessel was discovered in the surf at 43rd Street this week and now awaits its fate in a town-owned storage facility in West Ocean City as state historians and maritime archaeologists attempt to date it and perhaps discover from whence it came.

The roughly 25-foot long, L-shaped artifact was first discovered in the surf by swimmers in the 43rd Street area on Monday. Ocean City Beach Patrol staffers tried to remove the unknown object from the water,

but quickly realized it was something much larger than they were capable of moving.

The town’s Public Works department was called in and was eventually able to haul the giant piece of history from a bygone era from the water using a front-end loader and other equipment.

“People were reporting to us they kept bumping into something in the water below the surface,” said Beach Patrol Lieutenant Ward Kovacs.

“The lifeguards tried to get it out, but they knew right away it was something beyond the scope of their abilities.”


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From China View


The United Nations cultural agency announced today it will help Egypt build an innovative underwater museum in the Bay of Alexandria on the site of archaeological remains thousands of years old.

The idea for a museum, located by Cleopatra’s Palace and the mythical 3rd Century B.C. Alexandria Lighthouse, also known as Pharos, comes amid the growing recognition of the importance of underwater cultural heritage.

The first-of-its kind museum will be partly above water and partly submerged where visitors will be able to see archaeological artefacts on the seabed, according to a press release from the UN Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO).

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By Larry Smith


In the early years of the 20th century the Explorers Club was one of the hottest gigs around.

Back then its membership included men like Robert Peary and Matthew Henson - the white and black Americans who first reached the North Pole in 1909 (with the help of a few eskimos).

Sir Edmund Hillary, the New Zealander who was the first to climb Mt Everest in 1953 with the Nepalese sherpa Tenzing Norbay, was the club's honorary chairman for decades.

And astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin took the Explorers Club flag with them on the first trip to the moon in 1969.

In fact, a good number of the 20th century’s most influential adventurers were members of this society, whose New York headquarters contains a treasure trove of exploration artifacts and memorabilia.

Over the years the Explorers Club has sponsored hundreds of expeditions. And one of the most recent was to the Bahamas - to Peterson Cay National park off the coast of Grand Bahama to be exact.

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By Randy Boswell


The archeologist leading Canada's hunt for the lost Arctic ships of Sir John Franklin will get an inspirational boost on Thursday as he celebrates the 30th anniversary of his own world-class discovery of several 16th-century Basque shipwrecks off the coast of Labrador -- a stunning find that rewrote the earliest chapters of Canadian history and set the gold standard for studying and preserving the world's underwater heritage.

Robert Grenier, Parks Canada's 70-year-old chief of marine archeology, is hoping to cap his stellar career by locating the Erebus and Terror, the famously ill-fated ships of the 19th-century Franklin Expedition that are being targeted this month as part of a three-year, federally-sponsored seabed search of the Northwest Passage.

But even that sensational find would merely match Grenier's 1978 triumph -- the dramatic discovery of the 1560s-era, three-masted whaling vessel San Juan, found after his research team followed 425-year-old clues culled from a Spanish archive to a long-forgotten whaling station along the Strait of Belle Isle.

From New Scientist

Remains of a long dead house mouse have been found in the wreck of a Bronze Age royal ship.

That makes it the earliest rodent stowaway ever recorded, and proof of how house mice spread around the world.

Archaeologist Thomas Cucchi of the University of Durham, UK, identified a fragment of a mouse jaw in sediment from a ship that sank 3500 years ago off the coast of Turkey.

The cargo of ebony, ivory, silver and gold - including a gold scarab with the name of the Egyptian queen Nefertiti - indicates it was a royal vessel. Because the cargo carried artefacts from many cultures, its nationality and route is hotly debated, but the mouse's jaw may provide answers.

Cucchi's analysis confirms it belonged to Mus musculus domesticus, the only species known to live in close quarters with humans (Journal of Archaeological Science, vol 35, p 2953).

The shape of the molars suggests the mouse came from the northern Levantine coast, as they are similar to those of modern house mice in Syria, near Cyprus.

And, when generations of rodents live aboard ships, they evolve larger body shapes.

Yet this mouse was roughly the same shape and size as other small, land-dwelling mice of the time, suggesting it boarded just before the ship set sail.

By Catherine Brahic


Sixty years on and the impacts of the second world war are still being felt.

A sunken oil tanker, one of dozens on the bottom of Micronesia's Chuuk Lagoon, is releasing streams of purple diesel bubbles. On 31 July, the resulting oil slick was 5 kilometers long.

Corrosion experts say the 52 wrecks in Chuuk Lagoon could collapse in a few years, yet no-one knows how much fuel was inside the vessels when they sank. The problem could take on astonishing proportions: more than 380 other tankers lie at the bottom of the Pacific.

Bill Jeffery, a maritime archaeologist at James Cook University in Australia, is part of a team carrying out surveys of the Japanese shipwrecks in the Chuuk Lagoon.

The wrecks are overgrown with coral, house a huge diversity of tropical fish, and attract tourists, who provide welcome income to the local population.

Helped by the charity Earthwatch, the researchers have been studying the site since 2001, so that the Chuukese government can take steps to preserve it.

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From BBC News


The execution of two pirates from Aberdeen is to be re-visited during September's Scottish Archaeology Month. Robert Laird and John Jackson were among the Granite City's lesser known sea robbers.

They were hanged in 1597. 

Their story will be explored during an event called Tales from the Tolbooth, which will include a re-enactment. 

More famous Aberdonian pirates include Provost Robert Davidson who fought Highland forces at the Battle of Harlaw, near Inverurie, in the 1400s.

Chris Croly, of Aberdeen City Council archaeology unit, said the pirates went to the gallows for a raid on a ship at anchor at Burntisland, Fife.

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By Nick Meo


More than 160 years after they vanished into the northern ice on a doomed mission to find a North West Passage to Asia, an expedition will set off in search of the lost ships of Victorian explorer Sir John Franklin, the HMS Erebus and the HMS Terror. 

If the Canadian Coastguard's sonar manages to locate the remains of HMS Erebus and HMS Terror, they will solve one of the great mysteries of maritime exploration. 

The last recorded sighting of the two vessels and their 128 hand-picked officers was on July 26, 1845, two months after they had set sail from Greenhithe in Kent on a mission to chart the North West Passage. Their failure to make to their intended destination of China sparked one of the longest rescue missions in maritime history, in the course of which the passage was finally located after centuries of failed efforts. 

Of the Franklin expedition itself, however, only rumours of starvation, madness and cannibalism filtered back to London, based on the reports of Inuit people in the Arctic wastes north of Canada, who reported a group of white men trapped by the ice and slowly dying of hunger. In the 1980s the frozen bodies of two seamen and a petty officer in an ice-filled coffin were found.

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