Gadgets of future probe depths of past

Equipment with alphabetical names like ROV and GPS helps companies pinpoint the exact locations where ships - and their vast treasures - sank long ago.

By DAVID BALLINGRUD

© St. Petersburg Times, published May 13, 2001

Thousands of feet beneath the surface, far beyond the reach of wind and sunlight, the oceans keep their secrets in cold, black silence.

Over the centuries, commerce, war, piracy and storms have sent literally millions of ships and aircraft -- and their contents -- sinking slowly to a barren ocean floor miles below.

There they remain.

Many vessels that sank in shallow coastal waters have been found. Most, however, including those in deeper water -- 5,000, 10,000, 20,000 feet -- are undiscovered and untouched.

The bottom of Davy Jones' Locker, where the weight of water can crumple steel like paper, has been a secure storehouse for treasure of all kinds for thousands of years -- gold, silver and gems, to be sure, but treasures of human history, too.

But the storehouse is secure no longer. More and more, the pitch black of the sea bottom is being pierced by powerful shafts of light from small robots, tethered to ships on the surface far above, the ships in turn tethered electronically to satellites orbiting above Earth.

Just as deep space is being increasingly probed by advanced robotic spacecraft, the oceans are surrendering their long-held secrets to space-based technology and new generations of machines.

"This summer I will scan a thousand square miles (of sea bottom) in two months, and I will find every object in that area bigger than a 55-gallon drum," said Greg Stemm, a co-founder and director of Odyssey Marine Exploration of Tampa.

"That's where we are today."

The satellite-based Global Positioning System, or GPS, allows a surface vessel to fix its position to within a few feet and to follow a precise, reliable search trackline. Connected by cable to the vessel, side-scanning sonar sweeps the ocean floor with pulses of sound, providing a strikingly clear picture of objects on the bottom.

When a promising object is detected, a new generation of smaller, lighter remotely operated vehicles, or ROVs, with powerful lights and cameras are dispatched to investigate. Until recently the process was slow and imprecise. With new equipment -- some available to private companies only since the end of the Cold War -- the search has become efficient and fast.

"We're now doing searches at 20,000 feet," said David Jourdan, president and founder of Nauticos, a Maryland company with a record of success in deep sea searches. "The kind of equipment needed for that depth used to be considered developmental. But no longer."

Searching for Earhart

Last month, Nauticos announced it would soon solve one of the great mysteries of modern history -- the 1937 disappearance of aviator Amelia Earhart.

The company is preparing for a mission to Howland Island, a nearly invisible speck of land in the South Pacific where Earhart and copilot Fred Noonan vanished on their round-the-world journey.

Working with Elgen Long, author of the book Amelia Earhart: The Mystery Solved, Nauticos' experts say they have pinpointed a location they are convinced is the final, deep-water resting place of Earhart's famed Lockheed Electra.

"It's one of the biggest mysteries of our century," said Tom Dettweiler, general manager and executive vice president of Nauticos. "We believe she landed on the water in a semicontrolled manner because she ran out of fuel. Due to the unique nature of the environment -- cold water, low oxygen and extreme depth -- an airplane could be very well preserved in those circumstances."

The Earhart search is one of many tantalizing, if daunting, deep sea search projects under way or under study. Companies like Nauticos and Odyssey won't reveal them all, prefering to evaluate their chances for success without the pressure of competition. Nauticos has found sunken Japanese vessels from World War II and a 2,000-year-old trade ship that is the oldest deepwater shipwreck known. It provided this information on a few other expeditions it is considering:

THE ESSEX: In November 1820, the whaling vessel Essex was hunting a pod of whales in the South Pacific when it was attacked and wrecked by a large sperm whale. The whale charged and struck the vessel three times, crushing planks in its bow.

The crew escaped to boats and, with provisions from the sinking Essex, survived months at sea before reaching South America. An account written by First Mate Owen Chase was published in 1821 and became one of the whaling stories relied upon by Herman Melville for his classic, Moby Dick.

PRIDE OF BALTIMORE: In 1977, Baltimore built a replica of a 19th century topsail schooner to serve as a goodwill ambassador. Returning from a voyage to Europe in 1986, Pride of Baltimore was caught in a storm known as a "white squall" north of Puerto Rico and was almost instantly sunk.

Eight of the crew of 12 survived and spent five days in a life raft before being rescued by a Norwegian tanker.

WILHELM GUSTLOFF: In 1945, Germany began the evacuation of the Baltic ports it had captured earlier in World War II. The former passenger liner Wilhelm Gustloff helped complete the evacuation. On Jan. 30, the vessel sailed from the port of Gdynia, near Danzig, bound for the German port of Stettin, with about 1,500 soldiers and 6,500 refugees aboard.

In addition, documentary evidence suggests that a series of intricately carved amber wall panels known as the "Amber Room" was loaded into one of ship's holds. The Nazis had stolen the Amber Room from the Russians when they invaded and captured Leningrad in 1941.

Soon after leaving the harbor, the Wilhelm Gustloff was sunk by a torpedo from a Russian submarine. Only 964 people were rescued. No one has seen the Amber Room since.

"Locating and documenting the wreck of Wilhelm Gustloff would tell the story of the greatest loss of life recorded on the sea," Jourdan said. "An investigation could also determine if the rumors regarding the fate of the Amber Room are true and could lay the groundwork for the recovery . . . of this unique piece of cultural heritage, if it is indeed onboard."

If, indeed.

Enticing stories of lost treasure are plentiful, but picking a project requires hard-nosed business sense and research, Stemm said.

Treasure and history

Jourdan says he spends a lot of time in the Nauticos library, thumbing through the heavy volumes of Lloyd's War Losses, The Second World War.

"All of those ships had something of value on them," he says, "and many were documented to have had traditional treasure -- gold, diamonds, artwork."

"When you think of the number of losses over a six-year period, and then consider non-war losses, and other wars, and all the time of seafaring, the numbers are staggering."

Stemm of Odyssey Marine in Tampa agrees.

"The number that is becoming accepted as a baseline for the number of shipwrecks that should be considered cultural heritage sites is over 3-million," he said. "This number would only represent 1,000 shipwrecks per year for the past 3,000 years. The real number could easily be five times that many."

But the number of ships with significant financial value is much smaller, he said. And finding them, and then recovering their contents in a way that makes economic sense, are very large problems. Many vessels will be passed over as poor investments.

Odyssey, a publicly traded company, warns potential investors of high risk.

"Odyssey's business is extremely speculative and of exceptionally high risk," the company announces on its Web site. "Although the company has access to a substantial amount of research and data . . . the quality and reliability of such research and data . . . is unknown."

There are many ways to fail in a treasure hunt, and companies sometimes struggle with investor disappointment and legal problems. Two of Odyssey's principals -- Stemm and John Morris -- faced allegations they violated securities laws during employment with another company, but a grand jury cleared both after a lengthy investigation.

To be worthwhile, Stemm says, the recoverable cargo of a wreck must have a value of at least $25-million. "Mission costs, including search, archaeological excavation, conservation and publication could easily reach $10-million," he said.

Also, he said, "we must be able to negotiate a deal with a government, insurer or any other possible claimant. This serves to minimize the possibility of ending up in court.

"At this point," Stemm said, "I believe that there are less than a couple hundred shipwrecks in the world that fulfill all three of these criteria."

An Odyssey crew is in the western Mediterranean now, in the shadow of the Rock of Gibraltar, looking for one of those.

Search for 'Cambridge'

Cambridge is Odyssey's code name for an 80-gun man-of-war of the British Royal Navy, sunk more than 300 years ago during a severe storm. The search began in a very low-tech way -- by buying a kind of treasure map.

A researcher Stemm declined to identify "approached us with basic data which suggested that the ship had been lost with a large cargo of coins," Stemm said. "We used our own researchers to corroborate the data . . . and to supply more information that helped to pinpoint the location of the loss."

Then the work goes high tech.

To search with precision, a crew must know exactly where their vessel is on the unmarked surface of the sea. GPS tells them.

The 24 satellites of the Global Positioning System were put in space by the U.S. Defense Department to help target long-range nuclear missiles.

With the end of the Cold War, however, GPS use spread to the civilian world. At least a form of it did. Small errors were programmed into the data released to the public, so that potential U.S. adversaries would not have the same highly accurate data used by the U.S. military. The system still worked for civilians, but not as accurately.

That changed last year, when, by presidential order, the more accurate data was made available. Accuracy increased tenfold.

With precise knowledge of location, a surface vessel can follow a carefully planned, mowing-the-lawn pattern of search lines with extreme accuracy. Moving at just a few knots, the vessel tows a side-scan sonar, housed in a torpedo-like device called a "fish."

The research vessel Minibex is searching for the Cambridge in depths of 1,000 to 3,000 feet. The fish is being towed almost 2 miles behind the surface vessel, between 20 and 40 meters above the sea floor. As it "flies" underwater, the fish pulses sound waves outward, then processes the echoed signals into a image viewed on a computer screen aboard ship.

Low-frequency pulses travel a greater distance, perhaps a kilometer or so. High frequency pulses provide a picture with better resolution but don't travel as far, 150 meters or so.

"What we have so far," Stemm said, "is a number of targets that have appeared on our side-scan sonar that bear looking at with our ROV. Usually, we find that these targets are geological formations, 55-gallon drums, old containers that fell off ships.

"Occasionally we find a shipwreck," he said, "which could be anything from a 3,000-year-old amphora (two-handled jar) site to a recently lost fishing vessel."

Remote-operated vehicle, or ROV, development surged in the late 1980s and '90s, Stemm said. They became smaller, lighter and more available.

The weight of the cable that connects the ROV to the surface vessel is an issue in deep dives. If too much cable is extended, it might fail to support its weight and break. A smaller, lighter ROV can allow the use of more cable and thus dive deeper.

A smaller and lighter ROV also requires fewer support people and equipment, and is therefore safer and cheaper.

Odyssey Marine says its research shows that the Cambridge's mission was "to deliver a huge payment to a duke, who was fighting the French as a mercenary for the Spanish, Dutch and English."

The ship, reportedly carrying a huge treasure of coins, was lost in deep water during a severe storm.

The search is being conducted, Stemm said, as a joint venture with the Royal Naval Museum. Spain, he said, is respecting British rights to the vessel.

James E. MacDougald, board chairman of Odyssey, is the founder of ABR Information Services, a publicly traded company that sold for $750-million in cash in 1999. MacDougald, who invested $3-million in Odyssey this year, spoke of the "fascinating synthesis of state of the art science and ancient ships' logs."

The location and recovery of these vessels "were theoretical problems 10 to 20 years ago," he said. "Now it's possible to buy good equipment, hire good researchers and go find what you are looking for."

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