It took a little bit of clicking, but I found that the southern boundary of this sanctuary is a little bit north of Milwaukee. It's not very large relative to the entire lake.
I wondered why this specific place? What is so special about it? My best guess is that shipping to/from Milwaukee and the other Great Lakes would have passed through this particular region and there must be some some bathymetric feature [1] that causes particularly bad waves or something. Further south, Chicago was for many decades the busiest port in the US and yet has few shipwrecks: Lake Michigan is relatively shallow in that area - you probably need to go 5-10 miles offshore before the water gets more than 150 feet deep.
If you don't parse the sentence carefully, it sounds like they're anticipating the new marine sanctuary will collect/encourage/create dozens of shipwrecks...
Out of interest, does anyone know what the rules are on sending drones down to shipwrecks are? I know you can't physically dive some famous shipwrecks without permission because they're protected heritage sites but what about an off-the-shelf underwater ROV with just a camera (ie not salvaging anything)? I've always felt these drones would be a great opportunity for some interesting photography and given how deteriorated some well-known wrecks (the infamous RMS Lusitania for example) are these days it might be the last chance as well.
Are the Pyramids of Giza, the Taj Mahal, and many other man-made structures of historical importance not inherently graves too? Fair enough when there's still survivors alive, but for really old wrecks I don't think anyone can reasonably claim to have been meaningfully harmed by such activities. If "it's a bit morbid" was a valid criterion for not recording something, then many of the most famous and historically significant photographs and films in existence wouldn't exist.
Obviously the really famous wrecks like Lusitania and Titanic get exclusively professional attention and rightly so, but there's literally thousands of others which never will be recorded by professional archeologists and will soon simply be rust stains on the seabed. Not all of them necessarily represent tragedies either, for example there's a very interesting shipwreck in the Thames Estuary of a pirate radio ship called the Mi Amigo which was successfully evacuated and left to sink once the crew were saved. There's a lot of history there slowly rusting away which could be preserved in a sense.
I realise some people might be squeamish around this subject but as someone with an interest in historic ships I think such remote photography expeditions would on balance be a good thing. Ethically speaking I don't think it's materially different from land-based "urban exploring" which sometimes deals with morbid subjects, the Chernobyl exclusion zone being one of the most well-known target of urban explorers but there's also lots of other examples.
>A possible culprit in the degradation of the SS Wisconsin and SS Milwaukee that Thomsen and her co-author had cited in a preliminary report on the former is “the introduction of invasive species,” specifically zebra and quagga mussels. These two mollusk species often latch onto iron, steel and other hard materials that are commonly used in ship making. This encrustation can speed up corrosion and obscure a ship’s appearance over time, making it harder to analyze the degradation of the shipwreck.
Does this make sense to anyone? It was common knowledge growing up with these mussels that they colonized only about 6-30 inches deep. Past that, your feet basically weren't going to be eviscerated if you stepped somewhere, so I'm wondering how these (presumably deep) shipwrecks are getting colonized.
I don't know about quagga mussels, but last week I dove in a quarry where the zebra mussels easily colonized everything down to the bottom at 80 feet or so. Being filter feeders, I can't imagine the depth bothers them much.
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[ 4.3 ms ] story [ 22.5 ms ] threadI wondered why this specific place? What is so special about it? My best guess is that shipping to/from Milwaukee and the other Great Lakes would have passed through this particular region and there must be some some bathymetric feature [1] that causes particularly bad waves or something. Further south, Chicago was for many decades the busiest port in the US and yet has few shipwrecks: Lake Michigan is relatively shallow in that area - you probably need to go 5-10 miles offshore before the water gets more than 150 feet deep.
[1] https://www.ngdc.noaa.gov/mgg/image/michiganlarge.jpg
Obviously the really famous wrecks like Lusitania and Titanic get exclusively professional attention and rightly so, but there's literally thousands of others which never will be recorded by professional archeologists and will soon simply be rust stains on the seabed. Not all of them necessarily represent tragedies either, for example there's a very interesting shipwreck in the Thames Estuary of a pirate radio ship called the Mi Amigo which was successfully evacuated and left to sink once the crew were saved. There's a lot of history there slowly rusting away which could be preserved in a sense.
I realise some people might be squeamish around this subject but as someone with an interest in historic ships I think such remote photography expeditions would on balance be a good thing. Ethically speaking I don't think it's materially different from land-based "urban exploring" which sometimes deals with morbid subjects, the Chernobyl exclusion zone being one of the most well-known target of urban explorers but there's also lots of other examples.
Does this make sense to anyone? It was common knowledge growing up with these mussels that they colonized only about 6-30 inches deep. Past that, your feet basically weren't going to be eviscerated if you stepped somewhere, so I'm wondering how these (presumably deep) shipwrecks are getting colonized.
Edited to give more complete quotation.