I don’t understand the lure of finding ships miles deep in the sea. The cost is monumental and when you get there all you have is a picture of a wreck.
I know we raid tombs in the name of archeology and discovering secrets of ancient peoples. (Whatever is found, if we don’t understand it or cant read the strange maarkingsm it is usually labeled as religious rites
But a battleship picture from two miles deep holds my attention for a few seconds, less time than it takes to type this rant. Why not just do a computer creation and I’ll be just as satisfied.
Consider this underwater archaeology. One can see what the ships look like after they were sunk and see the amount of damage done. I’m a military historian and find this as interesting as I find in walking land battlefields.
And how do we do a computer recreation of how a sunken vessel looks, if we have no pictures of it on which to base the computer recreation. For example, the Kaga is sitting upright and the hull is intact from stem to stern; whereas the Bismarck rolled over and is on the floor bottom up and the gun turrets scattered near it.
This effort and the Research Vessel Petrel are fully funded by the estate of Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RV_Petrel
And these warships are treated as war graves and are NOT raided by the RV Petrel. And fortunately are too deep for others to try and recover them, as has been done with some WWI and WWII ships sunk in shallower depths.