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:Whhhaaaaa? Aussies had a Navy?

[Gorshkov]

The aussies had one hellova good navy - and also a good army & air force, too. 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.

Whhhaaaaa? Aussies had a Navy?

Do you really think it was the American forces that kept the japs from taking Port Morrisby and the Northern Territories? Try the Australian & British navies, who were out there fighting and doing their best to slow the Japanese down while you were recovering from Perl harbor. And just in case you think this a matter of me being a rampant Aussie nationalist ..... I'm a Canuck.

hard to believe..

[MisterQ]

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