Wreck of Australian Warship HMAS Sydney Found?

Mendy writes "Tim Ankers, a British archaeologist, claims to have found the wreck of the HMAS Sydney, lost with all hands in the Indian Ocean during World War II. He says that he's done this from the comfort of his home using software he wrote called Merlindown, which can analyze satellite photographs at different wavelengths to 'peer 75 meters into the earth and 16,000 meters beneath the seas.'"

Comments

Re:Too good to be true I think

[Anonymous Coward]

You're not alone. Apparently this story came out last week and Akers' claims already rejected by those searching for the ship.

http://www.smh.com.au/news/national/hmas-sydney-fi nd-nonsense/2007/06/03/1180809320635.html

FTA -
But Ted Graham, the chairman of the Perth-based volunteer company HMAS Sydney Search (HMA3S), says finding the shipwreck using the methods Mr Akers said he employed was impossible.

"All the advice we're getting is saying Tim's claims are technically not possible," Mr Graham told AAP.

"We've spoken to a whole lot of people and got advice from various people including technical people in government departments and they have all stated that what Tim's claiming is complete rubbish.

"I think it's just complete nonsense."

Sunken Warships on Google Earth

[Geodesy99]

His claims of course are WAY suspect - light of whatever wavelength needs to get to the target, then reflect BACK to the sensor, and well, the reason water is blue is that it's pretty much impervious to most wavelengths, and as far as IR, that wreck that deep would probably have cooled down really well by now to the ambient water temperature. I have seen sunken wrecks from satellite images though ... Scapa Flow has quite a few scuttled wrecks from WW II. See http://www.scapaflow.co.uk/graphics/blockship.jpg and then http://maps.google.com/maps?ie=UTF8&ll=58.927777,- 3.310318&spn=0.059626,0.126343&t=k&z=13&om=1 (.... Hmmm, been spending WAY to much time looking at synthetic aperture radar scenes .... )

Re:Sunken Warships on Google Earth

[Geodesy99]

.... what is available if you PAY up for quality data. Light (and all radiation) obeys the same rules of physics along the optical path, it doesn't care how much you 'pay' for it. The example I gave was Google (and they DO pay for their data, although they post it for free), but I do buy a lot of data ( I just purchased a bunch from the Alaska SAR Facility). I've worked with almost every type of sensor out there in most every atmospheric propagating wavelength - SAR, LIDAR, IR, NIR, Visible, from Landsat, Aster, Alos, Quickbird, from airborne and space located platforms. I even bout the X-ray glasses from comic books ads when I was a kid http://www.tomheroes.com/images/COMICAD%20xray%20g lasses.JPG ... And military platforms also have to obey the same physical constraints, although they do have certain other advantages. There is no 'magic' part of the spectrum which penetrates to the depths he speaks of, the best that's every been done in that zone were some air-borne active blue-green laser experiments.

Nonsense

[b00le]

This is nonsense: I work in the earth observation satellite industry and there are no ultraviolet or x-ray sensors on earth observation satellites (for obvious reasons - the earth does not emit x-rays, and UV is absorbed by the atmosphere.)
Optical sensors can see at most a few metres into clear water. At infrared wavelengths water is black and opaque. "Light passes through matter"? No, it doesn't. Didn't The Times use to have a science correspondent?