Aquatic drones that can autonomously search deep waters, found a ship known as the U.S.S. Stewart, or DD-224, after scanning nearly 50 square miles of ocean floor. The ship was resting in what is now the Cordell Bank National Marine Sanctuary. The destroyer, which is 314-foot long, is almost completely intact, sitting upright on the seafloor. Additional images were captured by the drones several days later. The U.S.S. Stewart was the only U.S. Navy destroyer captured by Japanese forces during World War II.
“After being sunk and abandoned in the waters off Java in 1942, DD-224 was raised by Japanese forces, who used it to escort their naval convoys,” a story about it in the New York Times said. “Allied pilots reported what looked like one of their own ships deep behind enemy lines.” After the war ended, the U.S. Navy used the ship for target practice and eventually it sunk, but the precise location wasn’t known. The search for the ship had gone on for decades and the find demonstrates the unique way these autonomous vehicles can assist in ocean exploration.
“This level of preservation is exceptional for a vessel of its age and makes it potentially one of the best-preserved examples of a U.S. Navy ‘four-piper’ destroyer known to exist,” Maria Brown, superintendent of both the Cordell Bank and Greater Farallones national marine sanctuaries, said in a statement.
These robots are also proving invaluable to marine archaeologists. “We’re in the midst of, I think, a radical change in ocean discovery,” said Jim Delgado, a senior vice president at SEARCH, Inc., a maritime archaeology firm involved in the DD-224 discovery, in the New York Times piece.