NOAA Archaeologists Discover Lost Whaling FleetOn September 12, 1871, in the dwindling light of the

NOAA Archaeologists Discover Lost Whaling FleetOn September 12, 1871, in the dwindling light of the Arctic autumn, the captains of 33 trapped whaling ships met aboard the ship Champion to discuss their limited options. A shift in the normal wind patterns had pushed the pack ice in the Chukchi Sea against the Alaska coast, and the whaling fleet was being crushed between them. The captains and their 1,219 crewmembers abandoned the ships. In small whaleboats, they crossed miles of ice and ocean to the 7 ships that had managed to escape to open water. Not a man was killed, but the fleet was lost.This fall, archaeologists from the Maritime Heritage Program at NOAA (the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration) brought two of the wrecked ships to light. Using sonar and magnetic gradiometry to scan the seabed, they identified the outlines of two flattened hulls. Magnetic gradiometry detects variations in the Earth’s ambient magnetic field; accumulations of magnetized material like the metal pieces found in a shipwreck stand out from seabed sediment. Underwater video captured more detail: anchors, ballast, timbers, and the brick-lined pots that were used to render whale blubber into oil. Videos from the survey can be viewed at the second link below; though blanketed over with sea life and sediment, shapes like the ribs of the ship are clear in the ocean depths.The loss of the fleet was a decided blow to the already declining whaling industry in America; on top of the lost ships, the 7 ships which picked up the crews had to jettison their cargo and their equipment to make room for the passengers. All told, the financial loss was more than $33 million in today’s dollars. Though continuing to decline as alternatives like petroleum and vegetable oil replaced whale oil, commercial whaling in the US continued until the 1920s. The populations of bowhead whales, the target of Arctic whaling, were devastated, dropping from an estimated 50,000 to about 3,000 by the 1920s, and today their numbers hover around 7,000 to 10,000, considered endangered.-CELSources:http://1.usa.gov/1ZPEuvGhttp://1.usa.gov/1RASGpv (Photos and video)http://1.usa.gov/1ihVMl2http://1.usa.gov/1ZcJ0T3Image 1: Newspaper depiction of the abandoned ships. Image courtesy of NOAA/Robert Schwemmer Maritime LibraryImage 2: Map of survey area. Image courtesy of NOAA/M. LawrenceImage 3: PI Brad Barr readies the drop camera system for deployment. Image courtesy of NOAA/ONMS/Hans Van Tilburg.Image 4: An anchor, a chain plate which held rigging, and other iron parts from the ship’s frame. Image courtesy NOAA. -- source link
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