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Wreck of Australian Warship HMAS Sydney Found?

Posted by kdawson on from the frieght-and-salvage dept.

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.'"

7 of 193 comments (clear)

  1. Sweet! by pmdata · · Score: 5, Funny

    *Fires up Google Earth to search for treasure and naked women in the shower*

  2. Re:Too good to be true I think by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    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."

  3. Comfort of my own home by lowid+(24)+_________ · · Score: 5, Funny

    What if you have an uncomfortable home?

    Nobody ever considers this end of things.

    --
    free music
  4. 16000meters is a bit off by hedley · · Score: 5, Insightful


    Mariana trench is only about 10900 meters. Whats he imaging at 16000? Sounds a bit crusty to me.

    H.

  5. Re:Whhhaaaaa? Aussies had a Navy? by Gorshkov · · Score: 5, Interesting
    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.
  6. hard to believe.. by MisterQ · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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

  7. Re:Sunken Warships on Google Earth by Geodesy99 · · Score: 5, Informative

    .... 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.