WEBVTT

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Okay, folks. We are on the bottom, here at hopefully the site of Wreck 15725.

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And today is truly a day of exploration, as we send the ROV over to this unknown sonar target.

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We're working off of an AUV side scan sonar image.

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It appeared to show a debris field, plus a larger object which may be a hull of a ship.

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Something interesting up ahead.

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Might be modern, huh? Yeah.

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They look like freezers or refrigerators. Yeah.

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Well, um, should we zoom in on this panel here?

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I don't think the spin cycle is going to be working on that.

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So problem solving for if your washer doesn't work.

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I'd like to return this to the manufacturer and ask about the warranty.

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It's a container. It's a shipping container, yeah.

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Let's make sure we get a good capture on the numbers on this,

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we should be able to trace these containers.

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Aren't like a huge number of containers lost every year at sea?

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Absolutely. There's a large number of them that are lost at sea, during storm events, for the most part.

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Ninety percent of the world's goods move by water, on containers like these, then to be offloaded and taken to your home town.

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Most people out there probably don't realize how much stuff ends up in the ocean.

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The research has suggested that lost containers can take hundreds of years to fully degrade in the deep ocean, if not more.

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From BOEM's standpoint as a federal agency, this is actually still useful information to us,

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as this still remains a shallow hazard for industry,

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so even if it's not archaeological, it is still useful information from a management standpoint.

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For biology, one of the things that's very instructive about wrecks or something like this that we can actually date

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is that it gives us some sense of how old the fauna is that's living on it and how quickly they can grow.

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Watch lead, nav. Go ahead, nav.

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My mother owns a laundromat and she looked up the serial number for these machines and says that the last RCA made was 2002.

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So it could be before that.

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That's awesome.

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That's pretty great.

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Don't see this every day.

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This is a bit surreal. We are at 1.5 kilometers over that in the deep sea

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and here we are moving through a field of chest freezers, fridges, and washing machines.

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You think of the deep-sea as a fairly untouched place, but this is just a reminder that it really is not.

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We still do manage to have an impact on this very alien area and ecosystem.