200-Year-Old Shipwreck Found in Gulf of Mexico

200-Year-Old Shipwreck Found in Gulf of Mexico

A recently discovered shipwreck in the Gulf of Mexico may have originally gone down 200 years ago.  The ship is full of ceramic plates, glass bottles and boxes of muskets.

The ship was discovered 200 miles (321 kilometers) off the Gulf Coast in more than 4,000 feet (1,219 meters) of water by a Gulf of Mexico mission led by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).  The ship’s wooden hull has nearly fragmented, but the greenish copper shell that once protected the ship's wood remains intact.

"Artifacts in and around the wreck and the hull's copper sheathing may date the vessel to the early to mid-19th century," Jack Irion, a maritime archaeologist with the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM), said in a statement.

The first hint of the shipwreck came in 2011, when a sonar survey by Shell Oil Company detected an unknown blip on the seabed. BOEM requested that NOAA investigate such unknown blips during a recent expedition by the ship Okeanos Explorer.

The researchers photographed deep-sea corals near the site of the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill. They explored a thick interspersed corals at the West Florida Escarpment, an undersea cliff.  They, then, put a device on Okeanos' remotely operated vehicle to measure the rate that gas rises in the water column.

The research team also explored four shipwrecks on the bottom of the ocean. One, explored on April 19, was first discovered in the 1980s, but has only been explored by deep-sea archaeologists twice. This wooden-hulled ship is said to date back between the mid-19th and early-20th centuries.  Its story is still a mystery.  An exploration of another wreck, this one near the mouth of the Mississippi River, revealed that what was once thought to be a ship cannon was actually a bilge pump.

But the most scientifically interesting shipwreck explored was the copper-plated wreck found 200 miles off the coast, according to Frank Cantelas, a NOAA maritime archaeologist. The ship was full of interesting artifacts, a remotely operated vehicle exploration revealed.

Posted by James Fried on Friday May 18 2012, 3:30 AM EST. Ref: CNN. All trademarks acknowledged. Filed under Featured News, World. Comments and Trackbacks closed. Follow responses: RSS 2.0