All this was once an island. Although it is now sunk, it is nevertheless fertile. We do our hunting and farming here.
Deep down on the bottom of the Baltic Sea, Swedish treasure hunters think they have made the find of a lifetime. The problem is, they’re not exactly sure what it is they’ve uncovered. Out searching for shipwrecks at a secret location between Sweden and Finland, the deep-sea salvage company Ocean Explorer captured an incredible image more than 80 meters below the water’s surface.
“I have been doing this for nearly 20 years so I have a seen a few objects on the bottom, but nothing like this,” said Lindberg.
Using side-scan sonar, the team found a 60-meter diameter cylinder-shaped object, with a rigid tail 400 meters long. The imaging technique involves pulling a sonar “towfish” — that essentially looks sideways underwater - behind a boat, where it creates sound echoes to map the sea floor below. On another pass over the object, the sonar showed a second disc-like shape 200 meters away.
Lindberg’s team believe they are too big to have fallen off a ship or be part of a wreck. (…)
The reliability of one-side scan sonar images is one of his main concerns, making it difficult to determine if the object is a natural geological formation or something different altogether. (…)
Odyssey Marine Exploration — a company made up of researchers, scientists, technicians and archaeologists — have at least 6,300 shipwrecks in their database that they are looking to find. Mark Gordon, president of Odyssey, says at least 100 ships on their watch-list are known to have values in excess of $50 million dollars.
“When you think about the fact until the mid 20th century, the only way to transport wealth was on the oceans and a lot of ships were lost, it adds up to a formula where we have billions of dollars worth of interesting and valuable things on the sea floor,” he said.
