An autonomous drone fleet overseen by Ocean Infinity has rediscovered the USS Stewardthe only U.S. Navy destroyer ever captured by Japanese forces during World War II. The marine robotics company’s trio of orange, 20-foot-long underwater robots found the historic ship while mapping what is now the 1,286-square-mile Cordell Bank National Marine Reserve off the coast of California. The 300-foot ship, also known as the ‘Ghost Ship of the Pacific’, has lain about 3,000 feet below the ocean’s surface for the past 78 years and appears to remain almost completely intact and upright.
“This level of preservation is exceptional for a ship of its age and makes it potentially one of the best preserved examples of a U.S. Navy four-barrel destroyer known to exist,” said Maria Brown, Superintendent of both Cordell Bank and Greater Farallones . national marine sanctuaries, said in a statement to The New York Times on October 1.
The USS StewardThe ship’s story is unique in US maritime history, making it one of the most sought-after wrecks in decades. Initially scuttled and abandoned after sustaining significant battle damage, Japanese forces managed to retrieve the destroyer, repair it, and redeploy it against America as a naval convoy escort. During its second life, Allied pilots began reporting what appeared to be one of their own ships, far inside enemy territory. Steward its nickname “Ghost Ship”.
The US Navy has the Steward after the surrender of Japan and planned to tow it back to its original homeland. However, while underway, the engines failed near Guam, forcing the fleet to tow the ship for the rest of the journey. Once back in the US, the ‘Ghost Ship of the Pacific’ was given a dramatic burial at sea on May 24, 1946: used as a target practice for naval forces, it still took an estimated two hours of fire to finally sink it for good. But in the years since, the exact coordinates of the location have been lost.
Numerous attempts have been made in the past to find the USS Stewardbut the successful search in August reportedly came about almost by accident. Ocean Infinity, which previously used its drones to help rediscover the world USS Nevada And Stamina wrecks, originally simply wanted to test several of its largest autonomous underwater robots at the same time. That’s when Russ Matthews, president of the nonprofit Air/Sea Heritage Foundation, suggested using the drones to scan for the ghost ship after finding the coordinates of the tugboat that brought it to the area of its last sinking . Although it typically takes weeks to map the 37 square nautical mile ocean floor, the drones have managed to Steward within a few hours.
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“We’re in the midst of, I think, a radical change in ocean exploration,” said Jim Delgado, senior vice president of SEARCH, Inc, a maritime archeology company that was also involved in the project. The New York Times on Tuesday.
In addition to long-lost shipwrecks, autonomous mapping drones could be used to identify promising ocean floor space for wind farm construction, and to map routes for underwater cabling.