Dive 09: Deep-sea Detectives
Video courtesy of the NOAA Office of Ocean Exploration and Research, Windows to the Deep 2018. Download larger version (mp4, 37.6 MB).

A chance discovery in the submersible Alvin in 2015 by deep-diving colleagues from Duke University and Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution revealed the faint “ghost” of a wooden shipwreck more than a hundred miles off the coast of North Carolina in several thousand feet of water. Resting on Blake Ridge, the wreck was briefly inspected, with the team in Alvin discovering scattered bottles, a ship’s navigational octant, ceramics, and a pile of bricks.

We returned to the Blake Ridge Wreck with NOAA Ship Okeanos Explorer to better understand the site and to create a detailed, three-dimensional “map” of the wreck with our colleagues from the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, other agencies, universities, the private sector, and the interested public. The magic of telepresence is the ability to share and connect, and for our team of archaeologists to interact with the scientists from other disciplines both on board the ship and ashore, as we were.

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