Slashdot Mirror
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.'"
My brother in law was an archeologist who utilized ground based sonar devices to look for Native American ruins. The resolution on the unit he was using was something like 10 meters below the ground, and required a very slow transit time and a good deal of energy.
Yes, tech progresses, but 75 m from outer space using only UV, Xray, and Infra photography? I am very skeptical.
On another note... if this new process is true then construction will have to pretty much halt in many areas of Southern California. There are stringent rules in place governing building on areas that contain either significant fossil remains or any sort of Native American relics. Several hundred million USD per year is spent on archeological surveys to determine what may be beneath a construction site. Various companies have reputations for finding little if anything, and so environmental groups sometimes employ other companies that usually find a good deal of things that will prevent construction.
Decently resolved pictures up to 75 m below the surface will prove what some archeos in the field already believe to be true... under current laws it should be almost impossible to build anywhere in the greater L.A. area because of the shear volume of fossil record.
They pulled two gigantic whales out of a toll road excavation in the middle of the desert... etc.
Regards.
Uh, if this is true then it is a big dea. A very big deal.
7 5.stm
Do you have any idea of how valuable salvage rights of all the sunken wrecks that this tool could potentially uncover would be? No? Well, here's a clue:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/cornwall/66719
That's one wreck. Worth half a billion dollars. Makes you think, doesn't it?
"Accept that some days you are the pigeon, and some days you are the statue." - David Brent, Wernham Hogg
But americans tend not to be aware of it, because a certain egomanicial general by the name of McArthur had this nasty tendency to ignore allies and claim that everything was done by the Americans.
Australia had, and still has, excellent soldiers. Mac Arthur was an egomaniac and no one other than Mac Arthur got credit for anything, regardless of whether they were American or Australian. However things are not as simple as you suggest. Australia had many of its forces in Europe trying to save England. Recall that the war had started in Europe years earlier than in the Pacific and England was just barely hanging on and absolutely needed Canadian, Australian, South African, etc forces. When Mac Arthur was ordered/tricked to leave the Philippines he was expecting to mount a counterattack to rescue the American forces left behind. When he arrived in Australia he found no counterattack/rescue force, not even enough of a force to defend Australia should Japan attempt a major invasion. The Australian generals were planning to trade most of the country for time and only defend the south eastern (?) quarter, to be fair that was where most of the population and development was located.
Having Scuba Dived regular on 100-150 ft deep wrecks, I too find this a little hard to believe. Even at that depth the amount of light getting through, the colour of the "wreck" and so on, would suggest that this is unlikely, even more so at greater depths. And that was in the pristine waters of PNG.
We found that the best mechanisms for finding as yet unfound wrecks were plain old research. We requested and got a copy of the microfilms of the WW2 records for the area from the US Archives. Slowly and meticulously (reading Microfilm projected onto the fridge door), following each report, we ultimately ended up finding around half a dozen new wrecks. The report of a Corsair that clipped a tree, while trying to line up for the airstrip, and spun into the bay, prompted a search for a tree stump, and and following a logical path to the airstrip, a probably location - sure enough a deep dive (180 ft - lots of decompression) found it. Biggest coup was the talk of an abandoned airstrip on a remote island in the Solomon Islands. Sure enough, worked out roughly where, found a single like reference to the "local name" for it, and sure enough, found three WWII fighters still sitting at the end of a punched metal runway, as if waiting for orders...
As someone said, an archaeologist developing software that the spooks, and/or mining types haven't been able to. That's a bit far fetched.
I would suggest "text scans" of historical documents may be more useful.
q