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Why scouring sea for sunken treasures is big business
By Eoghan Macguire, for CNN March 14, 2012 -- Updated 1147 GMT (1947 HKT)
(CNN) -- Deep sea treasure hunters may evoke storybook images of swashbuckling buccaneers on daring ocean adventures.
For those in the rapidly expanding sector of marine archeology however, scouring the depths of the sea for sunken riches is business -- big business.
"There are multi-hundreds of billions of dollars of potential in this industry," says Sean Tucker, founder and managing member of Galleon Ventures, a U.S. based historical shipwreck and salvage exploration company.
"Treasure bearing ships that have historical artifacts, coins, emeralds" dating back hundreds of years are lying at the bottom of the sea just waiting to be brought to the surface, he adds.
See also: Swedish treasure hunters mysterious find
UNESCO estimates there to be as many as three million shipwrecks scattered across the bottom of the world's oceans.
Although Tucker points out that only 3,000 of these are likely to bear treasure of any value, discoveries such as the $3 billion of platinum located on a World War II merchant vessel by American salvage company, Sub Sea Research, last month confirm the industry's potential.
The possibility to reap such bountiful rewards has inevitably led to increased industry investment in recent years, says Tucker.
Hedge funds, private equity firms as well as cash rich individual investors have all been eager to provide the capital to back increasingly specialized treasure ventures.
As a result, the biggest salvage companies are now able to utilize the same advanced tools used by big oil firms to locate deep sea drilling opportunities, explains Tucker.
The most expensive exploration projects, which are almost always in a deep sea environment, can cost in the region of $30 million dollars to undertake, he adds.
High tech developments are a logical progression for a sector where the rewards for success are so high. But Tucker also points out that the potential to make vast profits has led some companies to explore wrecks that modern day governments still claim ownership over without permission.
While most salvage companies seek the cooperation of the relevant authorities before commencing their operations, Tucker says there are a significant number of "amateurs doing it under the radar getting what they can get."
See also: Voyage to the bottom of the sea
Concerns about the methods of some of those operating in the marine archeology industry are also noted by Lucy Blue from the Centre of Maritime Archaeology at the UK's University of Southampton.
She says that some projects plunder sunken wrecks with little concern for their archaeological composition and academic value, leading to the desecration of important underwater sites.
"When you dig a hole in the ocean you are effectively destroying the archaeological evidence. If you don't do that in a systematic way you are destroying important knowledge of past maritime activities," says Blue.
Not only is this frustrating from an academic perspective, she adds, but it also ensures that important monuments to maritime history are kept locked away in the hands of private collectors.
"You have to question ultimately what is happening with what is found. Are the artifacts held in a collection that people can benefit and learn from or are they being distributed and sold for the profit of a few," says Blue.
But while she is quick to acknowledge that not all salvage operations are inconsiderate to archaeological posterity, Blue also states that it is important for governments to sign up to the UNESCO Underwater Cultural Heritage Convention to guarantee high standards for all underwater treasure operations.
See also: The unsolved mystery of nineteenth century ghost ships
Tucker also agrees and believes it will be of more value to salvage companies in the long term to cooperate with international bodies and to work to the highest ethical and archaeological standards.
Given the considerations of shareholders and private investors, he says, "there's nothing worse than taking your investors money and then having a government tell you can't keep the treasure you've found," he says.
Tucker highlights an agreement between Florida based shipwreck exploration company, Odyssey Marine, and the British government to locate the wreck of 17th century ship the HMS Sussex as an example of how private businesses and sovereign countries can cooperate to their own mutual benefit.
He also cites his own company's work with the government of Colombia -- where along with partner company Seaquest International,Galleon are negotiating a "host country contract" to explore various underwater wrecks, divide the profits of any treasure recovered as well as providing items of significant historical importance to national museums and galleries -- as a responsible and productive way to conduct the business of marine archeology.
If governments, academics and private businesses can work together in a similar way, he adds, then the potential of this billion dollar industry can be shared by all.
As an inspiration to the submarine pioneers of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, no other literary figure loomed as large as Jules Verne, the “father of science-fiction” and the author in 1870 of Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea. American submarine inventor Simon Lake, for example, credited his life-long interest in undersea exploration to having read Verne’s novel as a boy – and in 1898, he was thrilled to receive a telegram of congratulations from the author himself when his own Argonaut completed its first substantial ocean-going voyage. Educated as a lawyer, Verne lacked formal training in science and engineering, but nonetheless chose so shrewdly from the speculative technologies of his day in creating a futuristic submarine for his protagonist, Captain Nemo, that the essentials of his undersea vision – examined here – have nearly all been realized.
Nemo’s Submarine Precursors
Although very early submarine experimenters such as Cornelius van Drebbel in early 17th-century London and David Bushnell in the American Revolution had demonstrated occasional successes, it was only in the early and mid-19th century that the problems of underwater navigation were attacked in earnest. In France, for instance, the American Robert Fulton – later renowned as the “inventor” of the steamboat – attempted to win the support of the government of First Consul Napoleon Bonaparte for an undersea craft capable of breaking the British blockade. Awarded a contract for building a man-powered submersible of his own design, Fulton christened his boat Nautilus – the same name chosen by Jules Verne 70 years later – and successfully demonstrated it on the Seine in 1800 and later at Le Havre. Napoleon soon lost interest in Fulton’s initiative, but subsequently, he supported the evaluation of a less-expensive wooden submersible built at Le Havre by two brothers named Coessin. Their prototype achieved some limited success, but then nothing more was heard of it.
In the 1830s and 1840s, several other French inventors – DeMontgery, Petit, Villeroi, and Payerne – offered other submersible concepts, and some were actually built. But it was only when the French Navy became interested in a design by Captain Simon Bourgeois and naval constructor Charles Brun that significant progress was made. In 1863, Bourgeois and Brun launched Le Plongeur (“the Diver”) at Rochefort and experimented with the boat for three years. Powered by a reciprocating engine driven by stored compressed air, the 140-foot long Le Plongeur managed to average five knots submerged but suffered from inadequate longitudinal stability and was eventually abandoned. At the same time, other European countries were pursuing their own submarine programs, and on the far side of the Atlantic, the American Civil War had stimulated more immediate interest in submersible combatants, particularly in the Confederacy, where raising the Union economic blockade was a primary objective. There, the most spectacular success was achieved by the hand-cranked submersible CSS Hunley, which in February 1864 sank the USS Housatonic in Charleston Harbor – the first-ever sinking of a warship by a submarine. In light of his voracious reading and exhaustive reportage of the Civil War by the European press, Jules Verne would certainly have known of these events at the time he embarked on writing Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea.
For the submarine community, Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea raises fascinating questions: Just how prophetic was Verne in exploiting technologies nascent in 1870 to create Captain Nemo’s Nautilus? How accurately did he predict the actual evolution of the modern submarine? And how many of the undersea innovations he envisioned 130 years ago have actually been realized?
Designing and Building Nautilus
According to Verne’s tale, Captain Nemo and his men built Nautilus on a desert island in total secrecy by ordering components and materials from disparate sources and arranging their delivery to a variety of covert addresses. The design was entirely Nemo’s, based on the engineering knowledge he had gained from extensive study in London, Paris, and New York during an earlier part of his life. The steel double hull is spindle-shaped and 70 meters (230 feet) long, with a maximum diameter of 8 meters (just over 26 feet). As Captain Nemo describes it,
…Nautilus has two hulls, one interior, one exterior, and they are joined by iron T-bars, which gives the boat a terrific rigidity. Because of this cellular arrangement, it has the resistance of a solid block. The plating can’t yield; it’s self-adhering and not dependent on rivets; and the homogeneity of its construction, due to the perfect union of the materials involved, permits it to defy the most violent of seas.4
Submerged, the submarine displaces 1,507 metric tons (roughly 1,670 short tons) and surfaced, with only one-tenth of the hull above the water, it displaces 1,356 metric tons (1,495 short tons) – Verne is quite precise about this.5
Nautilus is controlled from a small, retractable pilothouse set into the top of the hull about a quarter of the way back from the bow. Several large bi-convex glass windows – 21 centimeters thick at the center – provide an all-around view, augmented by illumination from a separate electric searchlight mounted in an external pod abaft the pilothouse. There is no periscope – these would not come into general use for more than three decades. For use while surfaced, a small, flat deck fitted with removable manropes is apparently installed just behind the pilothouse, and this can be accessed by a hatch from below. Nemo and his first mate frequently use this platform for celestial navigation in conjunction with a pit log read out by electrical telemetry. The only other protuberance topside is a low “dry-deck shelter” faired into the hull for housing a metal dinghy that can be entered and launched from within, even while underwater.
Electricity – A “Powerful Agent”
With its imaginative technology, Nemo’s engineering plant for Nautilus is certainly the most extraordinary aspect of his design. On behalf of his nautical protagonist, Verne conceived what was essentially an “all-electric” ship at a time when the first practical applications of electricity were only a few decades old and a century before building any such ships became feasible. In Captain Nemo’s oft-quoted words,
There is a powerful agent, obedient, rapid, facile, which can be put to any use and reigns supreme on board my ship. It does everything. It illuminates our ship, it warms us, it is the soul of our mechanical apparatus. This agent is – electricity.
And indeed, Nautilus uses electricity for cooking, lighting, distilling fresh water, running pumps and other auxiliaries, instrumentation, and, of course, main propulsion. The ship is fitted with a conventional four-bladed propeller at the stern, six meters (20 feet) in diameter and coaxial with the centerline of the hull. Consistent with the relative diameters of the hull and propeller and the freeboard prescribed by Captain Nemo, Aronnax observes that when surfaced, the propeller blades occasionally rise above the waves, “beating the water with mathematical precision.” Verne has Nemo claiming a speed of 50 knots at 120 revolutions per second – probably in error. 120 revolutions per minute makes much more engineering sense for a propeller that size, particularly in view of the type of engine that powers the submarine.
Curiously, the main propulsion engine on Nautilus is not a rotating electric motor. English scientist Michael Faraday (1791-1867) had established the principle of the rotating motor by 1825, and an American blacksmith, Thomas Davenport, had patented a direct-current (DC) motor with all its essentials – rotating coils, a commutator, and brushes – in 1837. Yet, despite the fact that several motor-driven electric vehicles had been demonstrated in both Europe and America by mid-century, Verne’s notional design for the prime mover on Nautilus emerges as the electrical analog of a reciprocating steam engine, “where large electromagnets actuate a system of levers and gears that transmit the power to the propeller shaft.” In other words, the main engine seems to be mechanically equivalent to a steam engine with “large electromagnets” replacing conventional pistons – a choice that seems strangely backward-looking in light of Verne’s technical sophistication.
In contrast, the “breakthrough” that enables Nemo to generate virtually unlimited electrical power extrapolates electrical science so far into the future that only “the willing suspension of disbelief” keeps technically-astute readers onboard. Although some hasty writers have wrongly portrayed Nautilus as “nuclear-powered,” the actual source for her vast reserves of electricity is described as a hugely scaled-up elaboration of a well-known 19th-century primary battery, the Bunsen cell. Invented in 1841 by German physicist Robert Bunsen (1811-1899) – better known for devising the “Bunsen burner” – the Bunsen cell uses a carbon cathode in nitric acid and a zinc anode in dilute sulfuric acid, with a porous separator between the liquids. The device generates a potential of 1.89 volts, and later versions added potassium dichromate as a depolarizer.6 Let Captain Nemo describe his fundamental modification:
Mixed with mercury, sodium forms an amalgam that takes the place of zinc in Bunsen batteries. The mercury is never consumed, only the sodium is used up, and the sea resupplies me with that. Moreover, I can tell you, sodium batteries are more powerful. Their electric motive [sic] force is twice that of zinc batteries.
Had this actually been tried, the reaction of metallic sodium with sulfuric acid would have been exciting to behold.
Despite some ambiguity in Verne’s description, it also appears that the relatively low voltage of the Bunsen cells is stepped up to a more useful level using a double-wound variant of the induction (i.e., “spark”) coil invented in Paris by another German, Heinrich Ruhmkorff (1803-1877), around 1850.7 This same combination of a sodium-based Bunsen cell, probably some kind of periodic interrupter, and a Ruhmkorff coil is described later in the novel as a high-voltage power source for portable undersea lights. Ultimately, Nemo replenishes his sodium supply by distilling seawater and separating out its mineral components at a secret operating base located inside the crater of a volcanic island near the Canary Islands. The energy for this process is derived by burning sea coal, which he and his men mine from the ocean bottom.
Submerging, Surfacing, and Life Onboard
Similar to the approach adopted by subsequent submarine pioneers Simon Lake and Thorsten Nordenfeldt, the basic technique described for submerging Nautilus and maintaining a desired operating depth is to flood ballast tanks to establish net neutral buoyancy at the corresponding water density. The main ballast tanks are sized to bring the boat just under the surface when completely filled. For deeper submergence, additional water is introduced into supplementary tanks, which can increase the weight of the submarine by as much as 100 metric tons to match the increasing weight of its displacement with depth. As John Holland later established in his first successful submarine designs, a much more efficient depth-control technique is to establish slightly positive buoyancy and maintain depth using the dynamic forces generated by the boat’s forward speed. In fact, “with a view to saving [his] engines,” Captain Nemo also exploits dynamic forces, but only when he wants to take Nautilus below 2,000 meters. Then, two horizontal hydroplanes mounted at the center of flotation (that is, amidships) are used to angle the boat downward in response to the thrust of the propeller. Within a few decades of the appearance of Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, it had also been realized that stern planes are much more efficient for controlling depth dynamically, but Nautilus has no stern planes. In any event, Verne claims extreme depth capabilities for Nautilus – Aronnax reports reaching a depth of 16,000 meters (52,500 feet) in the South Atlantic – reflecting a time when it was not yet known that the world ocean reaches a maximum depth of nearly 36,000 feet in the Challenger Deep.
To regain the surface, the ballast tanks are emptied – not by compressed air, but rather by using powerful electric pumps, supposedly capable of working against even the highest back-pressure. Aronnax even describes what we would call today an “emergency surface blow”:
The Nautilus rose with terrific speed, like a balloon shooting into the sky. Vibrating sonorously, it knifed up through those waters. We could see nothing at all. In four minutes we traveled those four leagues between the bottom and the surface.8 After emerging into the air like a flying fish, the Nautilus fell back into the water, making it leap like a fountain to a prodigious height.
Although Nemo acknowledges that he has the scientific acumen to “manufacture” air for ventilating the submarine underwater, he opts instead to use electrically-driven compressors to store breathing air in special tanks, with periodic visits to the surface to replenish his supply. However, when Nautilus becomes wedged beneath an ice cap near the South Pole – another geographical misapprehension – this dependence on surface air puts the crew in extremis until they devise a clever way to free the boat by melting the surrounding ice – using electricity, of course.
Nemo’s crew are a strange, largely silent lot, and it’s never clear how many there are. The most Aronnax ever sees on deck at one time are about 20, but there are likely more below. However, the crew’s berthing compartment on Nautilus is only 5 meters (16 feet) long, so unless the berths are stacked like cordwood – or there’s a lot of hot-bunking going on – it seems unlikely that there could be more than 40. On the other hand, Captain Nemo’s quarters are quite lavish, consisting of a 5-meter bedroom, a 5-meter private dining room, a library of about the same size, and a 10-meter salon – 25 meters out of a total hull length of 70 meters. Moreover, the salon contains a priceless collection of European art, a small museum of unique biological specimens, and most famously, a pipe organ. Large observation windows, concealed by movable panels, are fitted into the outboard bulkheads, providing a close-up view of the passing underwater scene to both sides, illuminated as necessary by the external searchlight.
Captain Nemo as Scientist and Explorer
For underwater exploration, treasure-hunting, and gathering food from the ocean bottom, Captain Nemo has provided Nautilus with an integrated airlock and a suite of sophisticated diving equipment, which includes diving suits with a self-contained underwater breathing capability clearly recognizable in today’s SCUBA gear. Nemo credits the Rouquayrol-Denayrouze diving apparatus – a “demand-valve” system invented in France in 1864 – as the basis for his version, which uses back-packed tanks of highly-compressed air capable of sustaining underwater excursions ten hours long. For undersea illumination, spiral gas-discharge tubes – actually invented earlier in the century – are used as lanterns, with excitation by the high-voltage output of a portable version of the Bunsen-Ruhmkorff system described above.9 Outfitted in this way, Professor Aronnax, Conseil, and Ned Land join Nemo and his men for a series of vividly-depicted underwater expeditions, where they get to experience both the wonders and dangers of the deep.
Despite Nemo’s obsessive, vengeance-driven dark side, Verne credits him with unparalleled accomplishments as an underwater scientist and explorer. Among his many discoveries are the lost continent of Atlantis, a subterranean passage between the Red Sea and the Mediter-ranean (i.e., a subaqueous Suez Canal), countless new species of undersea life, and new findings in oceanography. He maps the ocean bottom, measures thermal profiles, and observes that in all the deeps of the world, the water temperature approaches the same limiting value of 4.5 degrees Centigrade. He skillfully conns Nautilus through the Strait of Gibraltar by taking advantage of the same deep-lying, outward-flowing current layer exploited by savvy submariners in two world wars decades later. In the wonderful world of Twenty Thousand Leagues, there is seemingly nothing that Captain Nemo cannot do.
The Undersea Legacy of Jules Verne
Accelerating progress in fielding undersea vehicles in the late 19th century – and rapid advances in both natural science and engineering technology – created the milieu within which Verne launched his “submarine novel.” For a non-specialist, Verne was unusually well-informed about recent progress in the science and technology of his times. Consequently, his reputation as a futurist rests not only on his imaginative predictions of things to come, but also on his uncanny skill in crafting convincing extrapolations of the technologies of his era to achieve those visions. Flying continental distances, journeying to the moon, penetrating to the center of the earth, exploring the depths of the ocean at will – all these had been thought of by other men. But it was Jules Verne who first popularized notional solutions to these challenges and created a sense of possibility that had been absent before.
So alive does Nemo become for us in Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea that generations of readers have been tempted to credit him with creating Nautilus and stimulating our subsequent fascination with the undersea world. But it is really the broad erudition – and extraordinary imagination – of Jules Verne that illuminate these pages, much as Nemo’s Ruhmkorff lights illuminated the treasures of the deep. Verne died in 1905, just as the first generation of modern submarines reached fruition and less than a decade before they achieved their first lethal successes in undersea warfare. In foreseeing the possibilities inherent in the submarine 35 years before, he had been right about some things and wrong about others, but the likelihood of fulfilling all the essentials of his vision is now little doubted.
While jet skies and motorbikes satisfy the average bloke's need for petrol-powered thrills, the uber-rich are sinking to greater depths to get theirs.
The recreational submarine has become the boy-toy of choice for a swag of adventure-seeking Forbes rich list fellas including Sir Richard Branson, the Russian oligarch Roman Abramovich and the Silicon Valley mogul Tom Perkins.
Branson has turned his attention away from racing into space to exploring the mystery of what lies beneath. The Virgin founder plans to take his self-piloted mini-sub 20,000 leagues down, to the deepest part of each of the world's five oceans, beginning with the Puerto Rico Trench in the Atlantic, later this year.
Hollywood royalty is in on the act as well. The Titanic director, James Cameron, first went below the waterline in 1997 in a former Russian military submersible to film his blockbuster. He returned to the watery depths in March this year to complete the first solo voyage to the bottom of the Mariana Trench, a 10-kilometre deep ditch off Guam in the western Pacific. Advertisement
For some others, the sub is an add-on purchase; something to throw on the back of the super-yacht before setting sail on the high seas. On Abramovich's $1 billion super-yacht Eclipse, the world's largest at nearly 170 metres, the submarine jostles for room with two helicopter pads, two swimming pools and bunks for 20 guests.
Submersible prices start at about $US750,000 ($724,900) for entry-level craft and soon rise into seven figures for customised models; a snip compared with the nine- and ten-figure price tags of the big boats.
The editor-in-chief at Britain's online charter service SuperYachts.com, Ben Roberts, said the inclusion of a private submersible could give luxury voyages a fillip.
"Vessels with submarines on board often receive a lot of attention on the charter market and it's understandable as to why.
"Super yachts offer an untold amount of luxurious freedom to their owners ... but imagine having the ability to travel both across the sea and under it; exploring the abyss of an unknown world, like Jacques Cousteau with friends or guests, on the perfect personal cruise."
For the octogenarian venture capitalist Perkins, a former Hewlett-Packard board member and one-time husband of the romantic novelist Danielle Steel, it's this sense of liberty that keeps sending him down for more.
Perkins's latest yacht, Dr No, has been retrofitted as a carrier for his DeepFlight Super Falcon submersible, which he has already tested off Mexico, the Virgin Islands and in the South Pacific. "I love scuba diving, however scuba does not allow you to cover the depth and range of the DeepFlight Super Falcon submersible," he says."The fact that [it] is flown like a plane gives you a marvellous freedom of accessing three-dimensional space that you cannot get otherwise."
Designed to dive to between 100 metres and 300 metres, recreational submersibles offer a relaxed view of the depths.
Perkins says his sub has research as well as recreational functions - he plans to use it to study the behaviour of whales and other large ocean animals.
For those whose budget does not stretch to a personal submarine, a super yacht to store it on, or the four-person crew needed for launch and recovery, a San Francisco submersible designer provides the chance to get in the pilot's seat for a fraction of the price.
Hawkes Ocean Technologies offers one, two and three-day underwater "flight schools" in locations including the Bahamas, Mexico, Jordan and Lake Tahoe on the California/Nevada border. The three-day course costs $US15,000.
"The owners we have sold submersibles to have been interested in piloting the sub themselves but they also train their boat crew or resort crew to pilot the sub so there are multiple pilots," the Hawkes marketing chief, Karen Hawkes, says.
Russia's Kara Sea may very well replace both the Gulf of Mexico and the North Sea as the world's primary source of gas reserves for the first half of the 21st century. Its giant gasfield Rusanovskaya is believed to hold gas reserves of 282 tcf and up to 4 billion bbl oil, and the Leningradskaya and Zapadno-Sharapovskaya Fields, just 30 and 80 miles south of Rusanovskaya, respectively, could both prove to be supergiants near or greater than Rusanovskaya, if current studies prove correct - certainly enough to supply Japan and China for the next 250 years.
Rusanovskaya, with a water depth of only 50 meters, and the related structures of the Kara Sea shelf are, however, icebound approximately ten months of the year and are only accessible with icebreakers. Several proposals have been made for exploiting these enormous reserves, but the usual configuration of arctic rigs and concrete platforms put forth by the Russians and occasional Western oil companies simply can't handle the Kara Sea ice. Furthermore, although Europe may be a market for the huge gas reserves of the Barents Sea to the west, Asia is a more likely market for those of the Kara Sea.
Faced with these daunting conditions, few operators have made overtures to the Russians for tapping the Kara Sea's resources until now. Recently, the American company Werner Offshore proposed a unique solution to the quandary - submarine production and a fleet of submarine LNG tankers.
Submarine Solution
Jules Verne foresaw the conduct of commerce beneath arctic ice back in 1870, with the publication of his remarkable adventure tale, Twenty-Thousand Leagues Under the Sea. In that classic science fiction novel, he told how the mighty Nautilus submarine commanded by the indomitable Captain Nemo, mined the ocean floor and plied the frigid polar waters at a depth of 3,000 ft beneath more than 4,000 ft of ice.
Only the US nuclear submarines Nautilus and Skate have since traversed the polar ice cap, in 1958, via the Northwest Passage from the Atlantic to the Pacific. During World War II, however, in the Battle of the Atlantic, German U-boats constantly patrolled the Atlantic to sink Allied ships, and to keep them constantly on duty, a fleet of submarine tankers carrying diesel fuel hid beneath the polar ice until needed, then sailed out to refuel the U-boats.
Dubbed "Milch Kuhs", or "Milk Cows", the U-boat tenders were actually modified U-boats themselves. They were built at the Deutsche Werke and Germaniawerft in Kiel, Germany, with a length of 67 meters and width of 9.35 meters. They each carried just over 200 tons of diesel fuel and a crew of about 60 men.
Herbert Werner, head of Werner Offshore, was a U-boat commander during World War II. To approach the problem of tapping the Kara Sea's gas resources and transporting them to market, he remembered the near-forgotten Milk Cows of the German Navy and adapted the idea of submarine tankers to meet the difficult conditions to be encountered. Once conceived, Werner took his ideas to the Russians and consequently signed a joint venture agreement to exploit the Rusanovskaya and Leningradskaya Fields.
Werner plans to build a fleet of 22 submarine tankers by the year 2013 at a new shipyard set to begin construction in Vladivostok in 1997, which will be jointly operated by Werner Offshore and its Russian partners. The tankers will be 1,300 ft long with a capacity of 170,000 cubic meters of LNG. They will be manned by a crew of 14 and powered with an air-independent, closed-cycle diesel system from CDSS of the UK.
Werner's production scheme consists of a fully automated, subsea production system - designed by Werner Offshore - which will produce the oil and gas, with the oil piped to conventional surface tankers for transport to Europe. The gas, however, will be piped to a gas liquefaction plant on the coast of Novaya Zemlya Island, where it is to be processed into LNG, then transferred to submerged submarine LNG tankers.
The plan is for Werner's submarine LNG tankers to carry the gas in an 11-day voyage under the polar ice across the Kara, Laptev, and East Siberian Seas of the frozen Arctic Ocean north of Russia to Alaska's St. Matthew Island, in the Pacific Ocean's Bering Sea. Once at St. Matthew, the LNG is to be transferred to conventional surface LNG tankers for further transport to Japan or China.
The first voyage of LNG under the arctic ice is expected to occur in May 2004. Werner Offshore predicts peak production will find the submarine fleet carrying more than 21 million tons of LNG a year
The colombian archives mention 1200 (no joke 1200) galleons lost at sea during the time of the spanish treasure fleet! only the treasure of the San Jose lost in the the battle of Baru a few miles outside of Cartagena has a load list evaluated in todays value at 17 Billion USD - no joke ! - this is a lot of money even for a billionair.
Colombia, legal follower of the spanish treasure fleet has indicated to be willing negotiate a 50/50 deal with professional treasure hunters that can pull of the recovery of such a treasure.
Mel Fishers Atocha (the biggest official find) shrinks to the size of a "mere sidenote" in this picture.
With gold prices up like never before in history - looking for lost gold - becomes a increasingly atractive business venture for somebody who can afford to be on the cutting edge of ocean and deep sea exploration.
Mel Fishers Atocha was a shallow water wreck - it took decades to find the pieces spread over kilometers and dig the sand and mud that hurricanes spread over it away.
Deep Water wrecks are frequently sitting undisturbed at the bottom of the ocean waiting for the one who has the technology to reach them. The treasure of the Central America was sitting on the deep sea ocean bottom with gold coins exposed at plain sight.
Developing this technology can be a interesting thing - not only from a scientific or military point of view...
A modern Captain Nemo could be the "owner of the sunken treasures of the world" - just like Jules Verne predicted in his Novel 20000 leagues under the sea...
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A submarine yacht, combined with a ROV as performed in the secret recovery missions of the USS Halibut - would be an ideal tool...
-- Edited by admin on Tuesday 13th of November 2012 03:51:48 PM