What a Dive

Imagine a one-celled organism the size of a mango. It’s not science fiction, but fact: scientists have cataloged dozens of giant one-celled creatures, around 4 inches (10 centimeters), in the deep abysses of the world’s oceans. But recent exploration of the Mariana Trench has uncovered the deepest record yet of the one-celled behemoths, known as xenophyophores. 

Found at 6.6 miles beneath the ocean’s surface, the xenophyophores beats the previous record by nearly two miles. The Mariana Trench xenophyophores were discovered by dropcams, developed by the Scripps Institution of Oceanography and National Geographic, which are unmanned HD cameras ‘dropped’ into the deep ocean to record life at the bottom. 

Okinawa Prefecture’s University of the Ryukyus has announced that large parts of a Mongolian ship presumed to have been part of a 13th century Yuan Dynasty-era invasion fleet has been discovered on the seafloor near Nagasaki.  The find is the first intact wreck related to invasion attempts of Japan by the Mongolian ruler, Kublai Khan.

The archaeology team, headed by Yoshifumi Ikeda, found the near complete hull structure about 1-meter under the seabed, and about 20-25 meters beneath the ocean’s surface off the Takashima Island in Matsuura Nagasaki.  The discovery is so monumental because much of the hull has remained intact, including a 12-meter section of the keels with rows of planks attached to the keel, Ikeda reported.  The vessel appears to be well preserved due to the cover of sand. 

Dozens of giant craters spewing fresh water and brimming with bacteria have been found at the otherwise barren bottom of the Dead Sea, new research shows.

In 2010 the first diving expedition to the springs revealed “a fantastic hot spot for life” in the lake, which lies on the border of Israel and Jordan (see map), said team member Danny Ionescu, a marine microbiologist for the Max Planck Institute in Germany.

The team found several craters—each about 33 feet (10 meters) wide and 43 feet (13 meters) deep—at 100-foot (30-meter) depths on the lake’s bottom. The craters were covered with films and sometimes surprisingly thick mats of new bacterial species, Ionescu said.

This month a British engineering team will travel to one of the most remote and hostile environments on Earth — Lake Ellsworth, which is buried under 3 kilometers of ice — in the first stage of a project costing over 7 million pounds.

The ice sheet covering the lake has trapped the Earth’s geothermal heat, preventing it from freezing.

The team will prepare for a challenging drilling operation starting next November to collect water and sediment samples from the lake’s floor, which will help scientists assess the stability of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet and future sea level rises.

Sea explorers announced Monday the discovery of a new sunken treasure that they plan to retrieve from the bottom of the North Atlantic.

Off Ireland in 1917, a German torpedo sank the British steamship Mantola, sending the vessel and its cargo of an estimated 20 tons of silver to the seabed more than a mile down. At today’s prices, the metal would be worth about $18 million.

I have never been disappointed by a program at the National Arts Club on Gramercy Park in New York City, and Dr. James P. Delgado’s recent lecture was no exception. Jim is fascinating, which should come as no surprise. For one, he directs Maritime Heritage at the National Marine Sanctuaries of the National Oceanic & Atmospheric Administration. Then, he is the former host ofThe Sea Hunters. Finally, he has just written Khubilai Khan’s Lost Fleet: In Search of a Legendary Armada.

The lecture, presented by the Archaeology Committee of the National Arts Club, along with the Archaeological Institute of America — New York Society and the Archaeological Institute of America (AIA), featured dramatic imagery, bringing history to life.

Marine archaeologists are in a race against time to preserve parts of a shipwreck they believe is the most significant found in British waters since the Tudor ship, the Mary Rose. Paul Rose, explorer, diver and presenter of Britain’s Secret Seas, visited the site.

“We’ve watched it fall apart in front of our eyes for five years,” said Dave Parham, senior lecturer in marine archaeology at Bournemouth University. “But you can only do one thing at a time.”

The Swash Channel wreck is an early 17th Century armed merchant ship.

It was found in 7-9m of water on a sand and shingle seabed on the edge of Hook Sands near Poole Harbour in Dorset in March 1990, when a Dutch dredger hit it.

It was left for almost 15 years until an assessment for English Heritage in 2005 found it was a much more significant site than first thought.

Aerial surveys are being carried out over Skye to help archaeologists investigate a 12th Century Viking shipbuilding site.

Boat timbers, a stone-built quay and a canal have already been uncovered at Loch na h-Airde on Skye’s Rubh an Dunain peninsula.

The Royal Commission on the Ancient and Historical Monuments of Scotland (RCAHMS) has launched the air surveys.

Staff hope to pinpoint new sites for investigation.

Working with marine archaeologists, RCAHMS also hope to find potential dive sites for searches for the remains of ships and other artefacts.

Archaeologists now believe the loch was the focus for maritime activity for many centuries, from the Vikings to the MacAskill and Macleod clans of Skye.

Shot down as the Battle of  Britain raged, the German bomber disappeared beneath the murky waves never to be seen again – or so it seemed for 70 years.

In fact, the doomed Dornier 17 has weathered the ravages of time and tide far better than it did our fighter pilots’ machine guns.

New underwater images show the plane lying 50ft deep in the English Channel, remarkably well preserved except for damage to the forward cockpit, observation windows and propellers. Some of its undercarriage tyres are still inflated.

A rising tide lifts all boats, but in a surprising twist, ascending sea levels launched a flotilla of rafts or canoes on voyages from China to Taiwan around 5,000 years ago, a new study suggests.

At a time when rice farming dominated in other regions, the inundation of the Fuzhou Basin in southeastern China starting about 9,000 years ago led to the creation of a maritime culture that eventually took to the seas, says a team led by archaeologist Barry Rolett of the University of Hawaii in Honolulu.

 A Midvale, Utah based underwater exploration and recovery company, Deep Blue Marine, Inc., has discovered what they believe to be the oldest colonial shipwreck in the Caribbean.

“We have found a shipwreck that we can definitively date back to 1535,” Deep Blue Marine CEO Wilf Blum said. “We have also found artifacts that are still in the Dominican Republic that date back to the pre-Columbian era. When you think about that, this is significant. This shipwreck is just a few years after Columbus and it is the single oldest shipwreck ever found in the Caribbean. We think this is something noteworthy.”

A group of Turkish and Australian marine archaeologists has uncovered a number of relics from the Gallipoli campaign, including hospital barges used to transport wounded soldiers to waiting ships as well as carrying munitions and stores.

One of the barges was found 55m below the surface.

The team began their search in May last year. Project Beneath Gallipoli, as it was dubbed by the crew, was the first systematic archaeological survey of the murky depths.

Archaeologists are criticizing the Smithsonian Institution over a planned show of objects salvaged from a shipwreck in the Java Sea, saying that the company that recovered the objects did not observe professional archaeological standards in doing so, the Web site Science Now reported Thursday. The ship, a ninth-century Arab dhow that carried glazed ceramics and gold and silver vessels from China, was discovered in Indonesian waters in the late 1990s and salvaged by a German company called Seabed Explorations GbR. 

Divers have announced the discovery of the wreck of a sailing ship that was lost 180 years ago when it sank in Lake Michigan.

The divers were looking for the remains of Northwest Airlines Flight 2501, which crashed into the lake in 1950, killing 58 people. What they found was a zebra mussel-covered vessel dating back to the 1830s, the Grand Rapids Press reported.

The 60-foot-long (18-meters) sloop was discovered by the Michigan Shipwreck Research Associates and members of the National Underwater and Marine Agency.

Shipwreck experts are evaluating a centuries-old 40-inch gold chain plucked from the seafloor while searching for a 17th-century sunken Spanish galleon off the Florida Keys.

The piece is tentatively valued at about $250,000. It is believed to be from the Nuestra Senora de Atocha, which sank during a 1622 hurricane. It was found Wednesday by divers from Mel Fisher’s Treasures about 35 miles west of Key West.