The discovery likely dates back to the continent's gold rushes. Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent six days a week. A metal detector hobbyist discovered a centuries' old coin while scouring an abandoned sports field--and the coin is especially rare for the area. In the southern Australian province of Victoria, treasure hunting enthusiast Angus James recently spotted a well-preserved 100 Mon Tenpō Tsūhō, a 19th century Japanese coin likely deposited during Australia's decades' long gold rush. "You never know what you'll find next," James posted to social media on January 25th, along with photos of his recent haul.

The'Lawrence N. McKenzie' sank in 1890 loaded with oranges from Puerto Rico. Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent six days a week. New Jersey beachgoers could be forgiven for mistaking a pile of recently spotted debris for washed up driftwood, but the staff at Island Beach State Park say the find is much more notable. According to park officials, erosion caused by weeks of high winds and intense surf has revealed a portion of a nearly 140-year-old shipwreck . On March 21, 1890, a ship named the was nearing the end of an over 1,600 mile journey.

Science Archaeology Medieval shipwreck mistaken for underwater'rubbish' Loaded with grave slabs, the 13th century English ship was dragged to a grave of its own. Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent every weekday. After centuries at the bottom of the English Channel, remnants from one of England's oldest surviving shipwrecks are finally back on shore. Yet the reason it took maritime archaeologists this long to retrieve items from the 13th century Mortar Wreck was not because of its depth or the ravages of time. The shipwreck was mistaken for modern construction debris.

Environment Animals Wildlife Fish The quest to find Shackleton's ship uncovered an Antarctic mystery Beneath the ice, an underwater robot discovered something far stranger than the'Endurance' shipwreck. Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent every weekday. The Antarctic Ocean's brutal conditions ultimately doomed Ernest Shackleton's famed 1915 expedition aboard the . Although the icy environment has quickly turned fatal for many unfortunate explorers, it's not an entirely inhospitable place . While attempting to locate Shackleton's sunken ship in 2019, researchers unexpectedly documented a strange sight-a sprawling, geometric complex of over 1,000 icefish nests .

Abstract--In this paper, we introduce ShipwreckFinder, an open-source QGIS plugin that detects shipwrecks from multi-beam sonar data. Shipwrecks are an important historical marker of maritime history, and can be discovered through manual inspection of bathymetric data. However, this is a time-consuming process and often requires expert analysis. Our proposed tool allows users to automatically preprocess bathymetry data, perform deep learning inference, threshold model outputs, and produce either pixel-wise segmentation masks or bounding boxes of predicted shipwrecks. The backbone of this open-source tool is a deep learning model, which is trained on a variety of shipwreck data from the Great Lakes and the coasts of Ireland. Additionally, we employ synthetic data generation in order to increase the size and diversity of our dataset. We demonstrate superior segmentation performance with our open-source tool and training pipeline as compared to a deep learning-based ArcGIS toolkit and a more classical inverse sinkhole detection method.

The ocean is warming and acidifying, increasing the risk of mass mortality events for temperature-sensitive shellfish such as oysters. This motivates the development of long-term monitoring systems. However, human labor is costly and long-duration underwater work is highly hazardous, thus favoring robotic solutions as a safer and more efficient option. To enable underwater robots to make real-time, environment-aware decisions without human intervention, we must equip them with an intelligent "brain." This highlights the need for persistent,wide-area, and low-cost benthic monitoring. To this end, we present DREAM, a Vision Language Model (VLM)-guided autonomy framework for long-term underwater exploration and habitat monitoring. The results show that our framework is highly efficient in finding and exploring target objects (e.g., oysters, shipwrecks) without prior location information. In the oyster-monitoring task, our framework takes 31.5% less time than the previous baseline with the same amount of oysters. Compared to the vanilla VLM, it uses 23% fewer steps while covering 8.88% more oysters. In shipwreck scenes, our framework successfully explores and maps the wreck without collisions, requiring 27.5% fewer steps than the vanilla model and achieving 100% coverage, while the vanilla model achieves 60.23% average coverage in our shipwreck environments.

Science Archaeology Wisconsin'ghost ship' uncovered after 139 years It took citizen scientists only two hours to find the F.J. King's final resting place. Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent every weekday. A group of Wisconsin maritime historians and citizen scientists uncovered a Lake Michigan shipwreck "hidden in plain sight" for nearly 140 years. The team uncovered the waterlogged wreckage of the three-masted wooden schooner in the waters off Bailey's Harbor, Wisconsin. On September 15, 1886, the 144-foot left Escanaba, Michigan, bound for Chicago with 600 tons of iron ore onboard.

Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent every weekday. A shipwreck accidentally discovered off France's southeastern coast near Saint-Tropez appears to be a striking well-preserved 16th-century Italian merchant ship. At 8,422 feet below sea level, the vessel is likely the deepest of its kind ever found in French waters, according to the official announcement. But next to scattered ceramics, metal bars, and rigging rests what appear to be jarring reminders of modern life. Earlier this year, French military personnel noticed an odd ping while guiding an underwater drone along a routine surveying expedition. Although intended to monitor potential oceanic resources and deepsea cable routes, the equipment flagged something sizable already laying over 1.5 miles below the surface of the Mediterranean Sea.

Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent every weekday. A Canadian kid is proof that major scientific discoveries don't always have to come from grizzled researchers with fancy equipment. Two years ago, then-8-year-old Lucas Atchison went on a family trip to Point Farms Provincial Park in Ontario. Armed with a metal detector he had just received as a birthday present, Atchison dutifully scanned the area, hoping to hear that coveted "beep." Eagerly digging into the site, Lucas uncovered a metal spike, which his father initially dismissed as something used to tie up boats.

When Hans Hartman, a civil engineer, attempted to film the ocean depths in 1917, he pioneered what would become the first deep-sea ROV, or remotely operated vehicle. During an era of silent movies and wartime U-boats, Hartman's ambitious invention--a 1,500-pound electric, submarine camera--could be lowered to a depth of 1,000 feet to capture images of sunken ships and submerged treasures. Despite featuring a gyroscope for stability, a motorized propeller for controlled rotation, and an innovative light source, as Popular Science explained, it had a serious limitation: The hulking apparatus had to be operated blindly from a ship's deck, which meant it was impossible for the camera's operator to see what they were filming until the footage was viewed later. In 1925, Popular Science showcased his next breakthrough--a cylindrical apparatus (seen above) attached to a ship by a cable, housing a submersible, motor-driven camera, as well as enough room for a person who could control the camera, or communicate with crew members nearby to aid with various underwater missions, such as salvaging. The vertical, tin-can-like submarine, equipped with porthole windows and a powerful spotlight, allowed "the operator to go down into the water with a camera and photograph whatever he chooses."