Okay, folks. We are on the bottom, here at hopefully the site of Wreck 15725.
And today is truly a day of exploration, as we send the ROV over to this unknown sonar target.
We're working off of an AUV side scan sonar image.
It appeared to show a debris field, plus a larger object which may be a hull of a ship.
Something interesting up ahead.
Might be modern, huh? Yeah.
They look like freezers or refrigerators. Yeah.
Well, um, should we zoom in on this panel here?
I don't think the spin cycle is going to be working on that.
So problem solving for if your washer doesn't work.
I'd like to return this to the manufacturer and ask about the warranty.
It's a container. It's a shipping container, yeah.
Let's make sure we get a good capture on the numbers on this,
we should be able to trace these containers.
Aren't like a huge number of containers lost every year at sea?
Absolutely. There's a large number of them that are lost at sea, during storm events, for the most part.
Ninety percent of the world's goods move by water, on containers like these, then to be offloaded and taken to your home town.
Most people out there probably don't realize how much stuff ends up in the ocean.
The research has suggested that lost containers can take hundreds of years to fully degrade in the deep ocean, if not more.
From BOEM's standpoint as a federal agency, this is actually still useful information to us,
as this still remains a shallow hazard for industry,
so even if it's not archaeological, it is still useful information from a management standpoint.
For biology, one of the things that's very instructive about wrecks or something like this that we can actually date
is that it gives us some sense of how old the fauna is that's living on it and how quickly they can grow.
Watch lead, nav. Go ahead, nav.
My mother owns a laundromat and she looked up the serial number for these machines and says that the last RCA made was 2002.
So it could be before that.
That's awesome.
That's pretty great.
Don't see this every day.
This is a bit surreal. We are at 1.5 kilometers over that in the deep sea
and here we are moving through a field of chest freezers, fridges, and washing machines.
You think of the deep-sea as a fairly untouched place, but this is just a reminder that it really is not.
We still do manage to have an impact on this very alien area and ecosystem.