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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.'"
*Fires up Google Earth to search for treasure and naked women in the shower*
Big deal - a ship is rather large. Can you find my keys?
.. paranoid crackpot leftover from the days of Amiga.
I'd be interested in knowing how his algorithm works. Finding sunken vessels 2 miles under water using existing satellite photos of the ocean(even if they are "optimum-quality") seems almost too good to be true. Not only that but to supposedly be able to make out gun turets of those ships? Seems like a bit of hocus pocus.
Perhaps he is going public with this in hopes that someone will want to purchase the software for treasure hunting.
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.
What if you have an uncomfortable home?
Nobody ever considers this end of things.
free music
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
If true, this guy just obsoleted the submarine. But by the same token, I don't think we'd be hearing about it if it were true. Any number of security agencies would have pounced on him by now.
Proud member of the Weirdo-American community.
Mariana trench is only about 10900 meters. Whats he imaging at 16000? Sounds a bit crusty to me.
H.
he's popped this in to sound clever, but the reality all he could have done is take exisiting data the same as whats on google earth and examined the colour gradients in an attempt to identify shapes which could possibly be a sunken ship. problem is the resolution on those photo's is WAY too low to identify a ship let alone confidently proclaim to know WHICH ship it is.
in other words he's an attention seeking moron. i'll take that back when he goes there's a brings back some proof. i'm confident he won't
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
in IR, UV and X-ray frequencies ... so what radiation is he seeing from 3km under the water? (not to speak of 75m into the earth).
Theory is nice and fine, but until it is verified by experiment I'd take it with a grain of salt.
... with imagery that is publicly obtainable, then it is almost a certainty that with the more detailed imagery at various specific wavelengths available from spy satellites, real-time tracking of submarines -- as well as monitoring of various subterranean activities should have been possible for years. In particular, we should have been able to determine where Saddam's supposed hidden facilities were -- or that they were nonexistent -- and we should also be able to determine with a high degree of accuracy, the exact location of the Iranian nuclear weapons production facilities.
Unless, of course, a British archeologist has outdone the entire technical expertise of the NSA and CIA. But that would make them look pretty much like bumbling civil servants rather than the sleuthing savants that we are led to believe they are.
HMAS Sydney find 'nonsense'
Mongrel News all the news that fits and froths
There is a lot of ill feeling in Australia (from veterans and their familes) against McArthur. I believe most of those come from his perceived mismanagement of the Australian forces under his command, like the invasion of Balikpapan. "Balikpapan was one of the most controversial Australian operations of the Second World War. By this point it was clear that the Australian operations in Borneo were not contributing anything to the final defeat of Japan and many high-ranking Australian officers considered them strategically unsound. The Australian Commander-in-Chief, General Sir Thomas Blamey, advised the government to withdraw its support for Oboe 2. The government, however, stood behind the Commander-in-Chief of the South-west Pacific Area, General Douglas MacArthur, who had devised the Oboe operations, and the Balikpapan landings went ahead. They resulted in the deaths of 229 Australians and around 1,800 Japanese." From AWM website : http://www.awm.gov.au/units/place_1913.asp My grandfather fought at, and was wounded at Balikpapan. That being said, there is no doubt that the industrial and military might of the United States saved Australia from invasion, however it should also be noted that Australian forces inflicted upon the Japanese the first decisive LAND battle defeat of the war, on the Kokoda track in the Owen Stanley ranges in New Guinea, at a time when Australia was under direct threat of invasion. To the parent, please note that previous to this, the sea-bourne threat the Port Moresby was ended due to the US victory in the Battle of the Coral Sea.
of foil to the hat.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
not picking on you for being from Canadia :) , but you mean Port Moresby and the Northern Territory.
Besides, the West Papuans had helped us Aussies a great deal in defending the norther frontier from the Japs. The Australian government has recently and shamefully turned their backs and allowed the West Papuans to suffer terrible human rights abuses at the hands of the Indonesian dictatorship.
Mongrel News all the news that fits and froths
To take nothing at all away from the exceptional job done by the Royal Australian Navy, the defense of Port MorEsby is generally placed at the feet of the Battle of the Coral Sea, which was a combined operation between the US Navy (2 carriers, 6 cruisers, 13 destroyers), and the RAN (2 cruisers).
Then supposedly a more real time version of this software using up to date satellite feeds could detect all of the submarines "hiding" in the oceans? Hoax?
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 .... )
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.
Actually, MacArthur had some justification for the claim.
Roosevelt and Churchill had tried to force the 6th and 7th Australian Divisions to remain in Burma, effectively abandoning New Guinea and Northern Australia to the Japanese. The Prime Minister of Australia at the time, John Curtin, made the decision to recall the troops despite intense pressure from the other allied leaders. At the same time, MacArthur needed Australia as a supply and staging post, so the agreement was made that the Australian troops would be returned to defend their country, but commanded by MacArthur. So in that sense, they were part of the American military effort rather than acting as an independent force.
It's worth emphasising though, both America and Britain initially wanted to abandon Australia, and allow us to be occupied by Japan. If it wasn't for Curtin's leveraging of those two divisions, it'd likely have happened
"I've got more toys than Teruhisa Kitahara."
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
One of his other favourite cons was the Deep Sea Gold..... While running the startup-con, he was also trying to start this con on the same investors.
He would claim to have intimate knowledge of an ancient wreck somewhere. There was the lure of lots of gold. All that the investors needed to do was stump up some cash to hire dive-boats and a little sundry, and they would get all the gold retrieved.
This guy had fake Lordships [where you buy a tiny plot of land in Britain and get the title] and fake ids. But in essence the fact that the wreck was out to sea and the investors didn't have an independent source of verification made the con a good one. The investors put in lots of cash, some deep sea divers were hired, but the fictitious wreck remained undiscovered long enough for the conman to drain all the cash from the investors. Then the conman disappeared back to whatever country he had never fled to before. No cash, now wreck, no gold, no money.
So now I'm always wary of deep sea discoveries... Special software to spot wrecks from the comfort of Google Maps and your couch??? The conmen will have a field-day if people start to believe this. Not saying this guy is wrong, but how soon until other people leech his achievements?
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The Japanese navy was responsible for planning an invasion of Australia. In February 1942, Admiral Yamamoto had set a plan before Japanese General Staff to land two Divisions on the northern coastline of Australia. They would then follow the north-south railway line to Adelaide, thus dividing Australia into two fronts. The plan was opposed by the Japanese army, and was not approved by Emperor Hirohito.
"I've got more toys than Teruhisa Kitahara."
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?
Science fiction for grown-ups...
While I agree that this story sounds like nonsense, you have probably found the most unreliable source for a rejection: A competitor who is receiving public funds to achieve the same goal.
"I'd sure like to be a fly on that wall... It isn't every day you get to see one divinity talking to another.
I don't know whether that conversation ever happened in reality but that quote sure sums up what many people who knew him seem to have thought of MacArthur.
Only to idiots, are orders laws.
-- Henning von Tresckow