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In 2012, the wreck was discovered 350 meters (1150 feet) deep. The wreck was initially thought to be in French territorial waters, and the underwater archaeology department of France’s Culture Ministry conducted some preliminary surveys in 2013 and 2015. Diplomatic negotiations on where to draw the border shifted the discovery site into Italian territorial waters in 2016, and the two countries agreed to collaborate on a wreck study. The joint mission’s first campaign took place in the first week of this month...This robot, one of the smallest and lightest in its category, can reach 2500 meters and allows not only...

........[The] SS Robert E. Lee was carrying survivors from sister ships torpedoed in the Gulf, from Trinidad to New Orleans. On the June 30,1942, as it reached just 25 miles from the mouth of the Mississippi River, a German torpedo hit. According to historical accounts, a lookout spotted the torpedo coming in and alerted the steamer's escort, the American submarine chaser USS PC-566. The sub immediately began dropping depth charges. The German U-boat, U-166, which launched the attack, was sunk with no survivors. Its wreck cannot be disturbed, now protected as a war grave for the 52 crew lost. On...

Nautical archaeology takes a leap forward For centuries the harbour of Ancient Constantinople, modern Istanbul, was the inlet of the Golden Horn, running north between the peninsula on which the city’s core stands and the commercial and foreign quarter of Galata and Pera to the east. A boom across the inlet protected the city from attack, although the Ottoman troops of Mehmet II stormed across the Golden Horn in 1453 to end the Byzantine Empire. A second, mainly commercial, harbour, in use from the 5th-10th centuries AD, has been found on the south shore of the peninsula, on the Sea...

The coasts of Anatolia are sprinkled with ancient cities whose harbours bustled with ships engaged in the thriving sea trade of the Aegean and Mediterranean. But not every ship made it safely to harbour. Many were wrecked in storms and sank with their cargoes to the seabed, and the remains of these have lain hidden on the seabed for long centuries. Wrecks of both merchant and warships each have their historical tale to relate, and are among the underwater sights that fascinate divers today. No other region of the world is so rich in sunken history as the seas around...

Nautical Research Group has returned from a highly successful scientific research expedition to RMS Titanic. In the course of processing the high quality digital video shot on Titanic last week, two startling observations of note were discovered. Preliminary findings have revealed that Titanic is in an advanced state of deterioration and some data may provide new clues to how she broke up near the surface. The first significant observation was that the mast has finally collapsed in the area above the bell stanchion. In a recent scientific article that Nautical Research Group president, David Bright will present at Oceans 2005,...

The reputation of a disgraced wartime navy captain has been restored, thanks to the discoveries of a documentary featuring the finder of the Titanic. For more than 60 years, Captain Herbert G. Claudius was blamed for letting a Nazi U-boat ‘get away’, after it sank the Robert E. Lee passenger freighter in the Gulf of Mexico in 1942. But an undersea expedition – aided by Dr Robert Ballard who rediscovered the Titanic 30 years ago – has revealed the first published pictures of the submarine’s wreckage, showing how bombs dropped by Cpt Claudius’ crew successfully sunk the attacker U-166. ........

<p>The desert winds swept over the sands and out to the sea. Waters churned and the ships, loaded with wine from the ancient city of Tyre, tumbled in the storm.</p> <p>Swamped, the Tanit and Elissa foundered around 800 B.C., coming to rest upright some 1,300 feet under the Mediterranean, too deep for recovery.</p>

The ship had a cargo hold filled with ceramic jars, some -- and perhaps all -- of them filled with salt fish. It probably left from a seaport in what is now Turkey and sailed northwest through the Black Sea to the Crimea to pick up its load. Then, for unknown reasons, it sank in 275 feet of water off the present-day Bulgarian coast, coming softly to rest on a carpet of mud. Last week, archaeologists announced they had found the long-lost vessel. Sunk sometime between 490 B.C. and 280 B.C., it is the oldest wreck ever found in the...

Ballard Chases History Again In The Black SeaExcavation of shipwreck part of 3-leg research trip By Katie Warchut Published on 8/14/2007 It's a painfully slow process, watching a robotic arm brush, inch-by-inch, the sediment off a 900-year-old shipwreck 400 feet underwater in the Black Sea. But when the dust settles, Robert Ballard, president of the Institute for Exploration at Mystic Aquarium, and his team hope to have a better look into a time capsule of early human history. About 6 miles off the coast of Ukraine, Ballard watched from a NATO research vessel Monday on a high-definition plasma television screen....

The very controversial Law of the Sea Treaty, LOST, which is still in committee, is a done deal, according to a senior White House official. Of the 145 countries that have ratified this United Nations treaty, the U.S. is the only major power not to have ratified it. Various groups of countries that have signed it include all of the G8 countries with the exception of the U.S., almost two-thirds of the countries in our hemisphere that are members of the Free Trade Areas of the Americas, as well as both NAFTA partners. The Law of the Sea was placed...

News of the Grunion.Someone please ping the steely-eyed killers. Thanx.

There was no distress call, no indication of enemy depth charges exploding or bulkheads breached, just a dead silence that stretched from a few days into 60 years. The USS Grunion disappeared in July 1942, leaving 70 American families grieving and the three sons of skipper Mannert L. "Jim" Abele without a father. Abele's boys -- who were 5, 9 and 12 and lived in Newton, Mass., when their father disappeared -- grew up and built their own lives. But they dwelt on the fate of their father. At 2 a.m. Wednesday, a grainy sonar picture e-mailed via satellite appeared...

Think of it as the Mars Rover but at the bottom of the ocean, remotely exploring our own planet's most alien landscape for scientists back at mission control. "This is how the science is going to be done," said Deborah Kelley, a University of Washington oceanographer. In 2000, Kelley led an expedition using a manned submersible to explore the deep Atlantic Ocean. Her team stumbled upon something never seen before. The researchers discovered a startlingly massive collection of limestone towers located miles away from the tectonic "spreading" cracks in the seafloor that typically produce such structures. Some of these hydrothermal...

The traditional circular sea route by which merchants are thought to have sailed around the ancient Mediterranean runs counter-clockwise: from the Greek Mainland to Crete, south to Egypt, up to Syro-Palestine and Cyprus, west to the Aegean via the southern coast of Anatolia, then to Rhodes and the Cycladic Islands, and ending up again at Crete and Mainland Greece. Longer routes incorporated the Central and Western Mediterranean as well. Merchants may, of course, have started in on this route at any point, for instance in Italy or Syro-Palestine rather than Crete. Recent evidence has demonstrated that a clockwise route...

NEW HAVEN, Conn. (AP) - The undersea explorer who found the Titanic will search the Pacific around the Solomon Islands for the remains of PT-109, John F. Kennedy's World War II boat. Robert Ballard plans to use remote cameras to find for the 80-foot, wooden-hulled patrol torpedo boat that was commanded by Kennedy. National Geographic (news - web sites) is working with Ballard on the search, set for this month. It may prove a difficult task. PT-109 sank on Aug. 2, 1943, after it was cut in half by a Japanese destroyer. Two members of Kennedy's crew died in the...

Two of the shipwrecks were likely from the end of the 19th century or beginning of the 20th century, including a "large motorized metal wreck" with no traces of cargo. In that wreck, researchers noted that the davits, which would have been used to lower lifeboats, were facing outward, which means any crew may have been able to leave the ship. The second ship was likely a wooden fishing boat.A third shipwreck was likely a merchant vessel that sailed between the first century BC and the second century. The ROV spotted artifacts that appeared to be amphoras, or tall, two-handled...

The legendary Titanic has been unearthed like never before — with the first-ever full-size 3D reconstruction revealing incredible new details about the doomed cruise liner 111 years after its infamous sinking. More than 1,500 passengers died after the ship struck an iceberg and sank while sailing from Southhampton, England, to New York in April 1912. The disaster has fascinated the world for more than a century. However, much is still unknown about the specifics of the shipwreck — but that could now change. The stunning images were created from more than 700,000 scans of the wreckage that were captured last...

AP, so auto-excerpted.

In the summer of 1495, King Hans of Denmark and Norway anchored his warship off the southern coast of Sweden. While Hans was on land, his vessel—known as Gribshunden or Griffen—mysteriously caught fire and sank to the bottom of the Baltic Sea.Hans was on his way to Kalmar, where he hoped to be elected king of Sweden and reunite the broader Nordic region under a single ruler. As such, Hans brought many opulent status symbols, including luxurious foods and spices, to help persuade the Swedish leadership to agree to his plan.Remarkably, many of those foods and spices have survived underwater...

DAYTONA BEACH SHORES, Fla. — Severe beach erosion from two late-season hurricanes has helped uncover what appears to be a wooden ship dating from the 1800s which had been buried under the sand on Florida’s East Coast for up to two centuries, impervious to cars that drove daily on the beach or sand castles built by generations of tourists. Beachgoers and lifeguards discovered the wooden structure, between 80 feet to 100 feet, poking out of the sand over Thanksgiving weekend in front of homes that collapsed into rubble on Daytona Beach Shores last month from Hurricane Nicole. “Whenever you find...