[HN Gopher] Dozens of Shipwreck Discoveries Anticipated in New M...
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Dozens of Shipwreck Discoveries Anticipated in New Marine Sanctuary
Author : wglb
Score : 22 points
Date : 2021-11-15 15:21 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.scientificamerican.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.scientificamerican.com)
| jasonpeacock wrote:
| If you don't parse the sentence carefully, it sounds like they're
| anticipating the new marine sanctuary will
| collect/encourage/create dozens of shipwrecks...
| OldHand2018 wrote:
| It took a little bit of clicking, but I found that the southern
| boundary of this sanctuary is a little bit north of Milwaukee.
| It's not very large relative to the entire lake.
|
| I wondered why this specific place? What is so special about it?
| My best guess is that shipping to/from Milwaukee and the other
| Great Lakes would have passed through this particular region and
| there must be some some bathymetric feature [1] that causes
| particularly bad waves or something. Further south, Chicago was
| for many decades the busiest port in the US and yet has few
| shipwrecks: Lake Michigan is relatively shallow in that area -
| you probably need to go 5-10 miles offshore before the water gets
| more than 150 feet deep.
|
| [1] https://www.ngdc.noaa.gov/mgg/image/michiganlarge.jpg
| tbihl wrote:
| >A possible culprit in the degradation of the SS Wisconsin and SS
| Milwaukee that Thomsen and her co-author had cited in a
| preliminary report on the former is "the introduction of invasive
| species," specifically zebra and quagga mussels. These two
| mollusk species often latch onto iron, steel and other hard
| materials that are commonly used in ship making. This
| encrustation can speed up corrosion and obscure a ship's
| appearance over time, making it harder to analyze the degradation
| of the shipwreck.
|
| Does this make sense to anyone? It was common knowledge growing
| up with these mussels that they colonized only about 6-30 inches
| deep. Past that, your feet basically weren't going to be
| eviscerated if you stepped somewhere, so I'm wondering how these
| (presumably deep) shipwrecks are getting colonized.
|
| Edited to give more complete quotation.
| BoxOfRain wrote:
| Out of interest, does anyone know what the rules are on sending
| drones down to shipwrecks are? I know you can't physically dive
| some famous shipwrecks without permission because they're
| protected heritage sites but what about an off-the-shelf
| underwater ROV with just a camera (ie not salvaging anything)?
| I've always felt these drones would be a great opportunity for
| some interesting photography and given how deteriorated some
| well-known wrecks (the infamous RMS _Lusitania_ for example) are
| these days it might be the last chance as well.
| daniel-cussen wrote:
| They're underwater graves.
| BoxOfRain wrote:
| Are the Pyramids of Giza, the Taj Mahal, and many other man-
| made structures of historical importance not inherently
| graves too? Fair enough when there's still survivors alive,
| but for really old wrecks I don't think anyone can reasonably
| claim to have been meaningfully harmed by such activities. If
| "it's a bit morbid" was a valid criterion for not recording
| something, then many of the most famous and historically
| significant photographs and films in existence wouldn't
| exist.
|
| Obviously the really famous wrecks like Lusitania and Titanic
| get exclusively professional attention and rightly so, but
| there's literally thousands of others which never will be
| recorded by professional archeologists and will soon simply
| be rust stains on the seabed. Not all of them necessarily
| represent tragedies either, for example there's a very
| interesting shipwreck in the Thames Estuary of a pirate radio
| ship called the _Mi Amigo_ which was successfully evacuated
| and left to sink once the crew were saved. There 's a lot of
| history there slowly rusting away which could be preserved in
| a sense.
|
| I realise some people might be squeamish around this subject
| but as someone with an interest in historic ships I think
| such remote photography expeditions would on balance be a
| good thing. Ethically speaking I don't think it's materially
| different from land-based "urban exploring" which sometimes
| deals with morbid subjects, the Chernobyl exclusion zone
| being one of the most well-known target of urban explorers
| but there's also lots of other examples.
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