With robots exploring the bounty of shipwrecks on the ocean floor, we're faced with the issue of whether to take it or leave it.
By Adam Goodheart
A camera sails through blackness, past streaming galaxies of plankton, bright flecks caught momentarily in an artificial glare. The bottom is approaching fast. On one side of the video screen, a pixeled compass records a heading just off due north; on the other, a number indicates an ever-increasing depth: 689 meters, 690, 691. The starry flecks come on thicker, a jerking shrimp veers toward the lens, and then, suddenly, at 730 meters, the screen is flooded with a burst of yellow light. On all sides the mechanical eye surveys a flat expanse of sand, lifeless and inviolate.
The robot's touchdown looks so much like a landing on some extraterrestrial world that it is easy to forget the action is happening half a mile below me, on the seabed. I am watching from aboard the research vessel Seahawk, an 86-foot converted shrimper that for the past month or so has been chugging back and forth across the western reaches of the Mediterranean. Ahead of us, the Rock of Gibraltar rises through the haze of an August morning; far off astern, the fat blue band of the African hills is just beginning to emerge. To a passing boat, the only clue to our mission would be the insignia on the Seahawk's smokestack: a raptor in silhouette, clutching a gold ingot in its talons. We are looking for a sunken ship.
Its cargo was, of course, gold, or possibly gold and silver: The men who are paying for this expedition wouldn't be searching for it if it had not been. When the ship sank in 1694, it was reportedly carrying a million English pounds in specie. Today, those coins would be worth enough to make their discoverers very rich. They would even be worth enough to pay for many more expeditions like this one, which is saying a lot.
For this is no ordinary underwater treasure hunt, where divers in scuba gear swim around looking for heaps of ballast stones and cannons amid the reefs. The sea floor that we are combing lies 10, 20 times deeper than divers can reach, under pressures of 1,200 pounds per square inch. Until not many years ago, it would have been considered as inaccessible as the surface of Mars. And so machines-very expensive machines-are conducting the search instead. Chief among them is the half-ton robot, known as an ROV (short for "remotely operated vehicle"), that has just landed on the bottom of the Mediterranean.
The control center for the ROV is a cramped room just off the Seahawk's galley, where three men now sit watching a row of screens. One of the monitors shows the location of our ship's hull as it circles and doubles back on its course, trying to hold its position against a strong current. Another shows the camera view of the sea floor. The third screen shows a sonar image: a big circle with concentric bands of blue, green, and yellow. It is this screen that the men are watching most intently. One of them cradles in his lap a control panel about the size of a computer keyboard, whose buttons and joystick he manipulates to direct the ROV across the sea floor. Every few dozen meters, he sets the robot down so that its pinger can do a 360-degree sweep, then propels it forward again, firing its hydraulic thrusters to send it skimming above the sand like a hovercraft.
In July, the Seahawk's crew surveyed 100 square miles of the Mediterranean bottom off Gibraltar, towing a low-frequency side-scan sonar back and forth to locate every wreck-sized protrusion in the area. Now, they are sending the ROV down to take a closer look at the most promising targets. But the low-frequency sonar only provided approximate locations. The ROV must use its own high-frequency sonar to home in on each anomaly-possibly a shipwreck, possibly just a wreck-sized outcropping of rock.
The ROV's pilot lands the robot and lifts off again three times before an inchoate shape starts to form on the sonar screen, coalescing gradually into an oblong patch of pink amid the blue. "There's our target, right ahead," says the project supervisor, a lanky Englishman named John Astley. And sure enough, as the robot approaches, the pink blob grows distinct along its edges, with an outline that pinches in sharply at one end and squares off neatly at the other: no rock, obviously.
We're all watching the video screen now. The bright circle of the ROV's headlamps edges forward, and from a thicket of sea plants emerge the ribs of a ship. The wood, hollowed out by teredo worms, looks ancient. Just in front of the skeletal structure lies a large object of rusted metal, roughly cylindrical in appearance. Could it be a cannon?
The robot swings closer, and the metal cylinder resolves itself into something flatter and wider: a buckled piece of hull plating. Astley grimaces. "That's steel," he says. Then, a moment later: "Look-paint." This is not a 17th-century shipwreck.
As the ROV noses its way around the sunken vessel's hull, we glimpse more hull plates, some rusted loops of steel cable, and an old-fashioned glass bottle, squarish and green, lying by itself on the sand. "Probably an early-20th-century ship-a fishing boat or cargo boat of some sort," Astley says.
Amid the general disappointment, it's easy to forget that what we've seen today is still something pretty extraordinary: a frozen moment of the past, preserved in a place that no one before us has ever visited. Out here on this stretch of sea just inside the Pillars of Hercules, which once marked the boundary between the known and the unknown worlds, the Seahawk is playing its small part in an ongoing voyage of discovery. It's a voyage being embarked on by many ships of different nations, sailing on every ocean, sometimes with great fanfare, sometimes in secrecy.
And as far as certain people are concerned, it is a voyage that should not be embarked on at all-or not yet, at least, and not by those who are presently carrying it out. In their eyes, the insignia outlined on the Seahawk's smokestack may as well be a pirate's skull and crossbones.
Stories of deep-sea discovery seem almost commonplace these days. The same week I was aboard the Seahawk, Paramount Pictures released the videotape of its movie Titanic, which opens with actual footage of an ROV probing the remains of the great liner two miles beneath the North Atlantic. A couple of weeks before that, the Discovery Channel aired the most-watched program in its history: a live broadcast of a commercial salvor's successful effort to raise a piece of the Titanic's hull. Throughout the summer, a book called Ship of Gold in the Deep Blue Sea was a steady bestseller; it chronicled the deep-water recovery of treasure from an 1857 steamship.
But while the general public has cheered such exploits, not everyone has been quite so thrilled. For the past several decades, archaeologists have watched in dismay as shallow-water shipwrecks worldwide have been looted by commercial treasure hunters and casual sport divers. It is said that in some places, such as along the Mediterranean coasts of France and Italy and in parts of the Gulf of Mexico, practically every wreck site accessible to scuba divers has been picked clean. "The wooden fabric of the ship, as well as artifacts like combs and spoons and shoes-the meat of archaeology-is often blown to hell in the process of looking for gold and silver," says Dan Lenihan, who oversees underwater sites for the National Park Service.
Even when salvors operate with government permission and supervision, there have been horror stories. In 1982, the oldest-known European shipwreck in the Western Hemisphere was partially destroyed with explosives by salvors seeking treasure. In 1986, treasure hunters in Delaware-working with a state permit and on live television-raised the hull of a 1798 British warship, the HMS De Braak. In the process, they managed to dump the ship's contents back into the sea accidentally (they later recovered some of the fragile artifacts using a clamshell dredge and industrial gravel separator) and severely damaged the hull itself. In response to such incidents, many countries have passed laws intended to protect wreck sites in their coastal waters.
But beyond a few miles offshore, where the vast majority of undiscovered deep-water wrecks lie, there's nothing to prevent salvors from pulling up whatever they want, however they want-or even from going around dynamiting Spanish galleons, if they're so inclined. The relevant codes of international maritime law actually encourage salvage; they were enacted long ago, not to deal with historic shipwrecks but to encourage the rescue of vessels and cargo in peril on the high seas. Last summer, representatives of more than 50 nations met in Paris under the aegis of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), which has prepared a draft treaty that would limit and regulate shipwreck salvage in international waters. That treaty, however, is still years, if not decades, away from passage.
The opening of the deep ocean to exploration-and exploitation-didn't happen overnight, although it sometimes seems that way. It is a process that began several decades ago and is just now reaching full maturity.
Manned submarines, of course, have been around for a long time. As late as the 1960s, however, even the most advanced vessels could venture no deeper than about 300 meters, and in any case they were designed to function as underwater battleships, not to explore what lay under the sea. Nearly the entire ocean floor, more than half the earth's total surface area, was accessible only to bathyscaphs, containers that simply dropped down like fishing weights, maneuvered clumsily around the bottom, then ascended.
It took a disaster to change all this. On April 10, 1963, the USS Thresher, pride of the Navy's nuclear submarine fleet, sank off Nova Scotia in more than a mile and a half of water. Compounding the catastrophe, the U.S. Navy found itself barely capable of getting a bathyscaph down to the wreck, let alone recovering its lost nuclear reactor. This failure was a Sputnik-style wake-up call to the military establishment, which quickly launched a full-press effort to expand American might into the deep. Within just a few years, the Navy was building new underwater vehicles able to recover objects from the deep ocean, advanced sonar for surveying the sea bottom, and diving robots fitted with television cameras and mechanical arms.
At the end of the Cold War, much of this technology was declassified or even sold off to the public. In many cases, similar devices had already been developed by the oil industry, which since the 1970s had made extensive use of ROVs in its own ever-expanding ventures on the ocean floor. Such machines, with very few alterations, could work as effectively at excavating a historic ship as they could at recovering a dropped missile or fixing a damaged pipeline. In 1981, a salvor working with equipment borrowed from the oil companies brought up several tons of gold from the HMS Edinburgh, a World War II vessel sunk 250 meters deep off Murmansk. Four years later, using a Navy research vessel, explorer Robert Ballard found the Titanic, and once that happened, it was clear that no lost ship, no matter how deep it lay, could ever again be called unreachable.
In the last decade, more and more people have begun making forays into deep water. Since many of the expeditions shun publicity, it is hard to say exactly how many occur. The only evidence is anecdotal. Wayne Hughes, a vice president of Oceaneering International, Inc., the biggest provider of deep-ocean-exploration technology to both treasure hunters and the oil industry, says he knows of about a dozen firms in the world that are actively involved in deep-water historic salvage; about half of these operate in secrecy. "We found 12 wrecks for one organization that no one ever heard about," he boasts.
Already, there have been several egregious cases of deep-water pillage. In 1996 and 1997, Christie's, the London auction house, sold off treasure from two 19th-century European wrecks, the RMS Douro and the General Abbatucci, which lay 500 meters and 2,500 meters deep, respectively. The salvor, a privately held British company, had used oil-drilling equipment to rip apart each wreck's hull, as though opening a tin can, and extract coins, jewelry, and other artifacts.
The proposed UNESCO treaty would attempt to prevent such abuses by forbidding the sale of any artifacts from historic shipwrecks and by extending the zone within which a nation could claim control over underwater sites. The United States would have its jurisdiction extended from 12 miles to more than 200. But the agreement has been forestalled by objections from some parties, including the U.S. negotiators, who think its antisalvage measures are too sweeping, as well as by other, even more problematic concerns. At the recent meeting in Paris, there was a sharp exchange between Spanish delegates, who, not surprisingly, favored granting control of sunken warships to the nation where the vessels originated, no matter where in the world they sank, and the Colombians, who saw things a bit differently.
The one thing everyone agrees on is that, for all intents and purposes, the deep oceans remain a closed time capsule. And every indication is that it is an exceptionally rich time capsule-archaeologically as well as monetarily. The value of shipwrecks generally, besides what they have to tell about maritime history, is that, unlike most land sites, each freezes in time a particular moment in history, the moment of its sinking. Each is, in a sense, a small-scale Pompeii. And like the ash of Vesuvius, the ocean can, under certain conditions, be an extraordinary preservative environment. This is especially true in its cold, lightless depths, where fewer destructive microorganisms live, and where wrecks lie mostly beyond the reach of storms, trawler nets, and scuba divers.
No one knows for sure how much waits to be found because almost no one has looked yet. In The Universe Below, his 1997 book on deep-ocean exploration, New York Times science reporter William Broad wrote: "Human eyes have glimpsed perhaps one-millionth of this dark realm. Perhaps a thousandth or a billionth. No one knows, and in any case the precise number is immaterial. The truth is that our planet has managed to remain largely unexplored, until now."