Modern Deep-Sea Treasure-Hunting

Paper Summary:

This paper examines how hunting for sunken treasure on the ocean floor depends, as it always has, on reports of shipwrecks written shortly after the fact, old maps, and lore passed down; it sometimes depends on locating the ships with sonar, but usually with divers simply getting in the water, swimming down and out from the search ship as far as they could. In particular, it looks at how, for the past couple of decades, treasure divers have become treasure hunters, sending down robotic "hands", which are capable of working much deeper than a human body, after finding the treasure with a new form of sonar, side-scan sonar.

From the Paper:

"Mel Fisher, in the 1980s and 1990s, was one of the most successful and famous treasure hunters. His Treasure Salvors of Florida had found the Atocha, a rich wreck in 54 feet of water off the Florida Keys. His first find, however, had been engineered with a machine he tinkered together himself. Towed beneath the search ship and shaped like a mailbox, it was metal device that could channel prop wash straight to the ocean floor where the resulting turbulence would lift tons of sediment and reveal wrecks. That find, in the 1960s, was gold doubloons from a fleet of treasure ships that sank in 1715. By the time of his big find in the early 1970s, the Atocha, early side scan sonar was available and Fisher was using it."

More papers on Modern Deep-Sea Treasure-Hunting:

• Analytical Essay # 141381 : "Bioluminescence in Deep Sea Species"
• Research Paper # 148086 : "Constraints on Food Availability in the Deep Sea"
• Analytical Essay # 57463 : "Deep Sea Fishing"

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