Some Very Cool Maritime Archaeology

[Yazata]

I think that this is cool.

The USS Independence was a small 'escort' aircraft carrier built during World War II that saw action various places including the Battle of Leyte Gulf. After the war it was declared surplus to requirements.

That's when its real adventure began. It was sailed to Bikini atoll in the Pacific in 1946 as part of a huge fleet of some 70 ships, many of them captured Japanese vessels. It was covered with instruments like pressure gauges and then an atomic bomb was detonated in the middle of the fleet to see what effect a-bombs had on warships and other kinds of ships. The detonation was just 500 yards from the Independence.

It survived! As you would expect, damage was substantial though. It was towed back to the US for study and was tied up at Hunter's Point Naval Shipyard in San Francisco for five years. (There's a previously classified photo of it there along with radiation warning signs, in the Daily Mail story.)

Finally in 1951 it was towed out to sea with scuttling charges aboard and sunk about 30 miles west of Half Moon Bay. (I used to work in Half Moon Bay and live not far from there.)

It was forgotten for many years (despite the Navy always knowing where it was) until a NOAA seafloor mapping project found it on its scanning sonar, sitting upright on the seafloor. So an exploration party recently set out to dispatch two underwater robots to photograph it.

It's in surprisingly good shape. The assumption was that there were no aircraft aboard it, but the photos reveal two F5F Hellcat fighters. Presumably they were on the ship during the a-bomb blast so the Navy could see what happened to planes sheltered in a carrier's hanger deck. The planes look surprisingly intact, given the conditions, though both have their engine cowlings missing. (Perhaps the researchers wanted to inspect their engines.)

There's not a lot of sea life on it. The big exception is huge sponges, in all kinds of bizarre shapes. The photo of one giant sponge shows two large crabs inside its bowl-like shape. I don't know if the paucity of sea life (apart from the everpresent sponges) is to be expected at the depth the ship is at, or whether it has something to do with radioactivity. (I suspect the former, it's not highly radioactive after all.) So this thing will be of interest not only to marine historians, but to marine biologists too.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/a...dence.html

Here it is during WWII:

[Image: 150417095927-02-uss-independence-wreck-0...er-169.jpg]

The A-bomb exploding in the middle of the test fleet:

[Image: 1*YOm1IGfS4ydITqu8cnEpAw.jpeg]

Here it is after an atomic blast just 500 yards away!:

[Image: 150417095418-01-uss-independence-wreck-0...er-169.jpg]

Sponges!

[Image: uss-independence-dive-5.jpg?interpolatio...size=660:*]

One of the two WWII-era Hellcat fighters on the carrier's hanger deck:

[Image: uss-independence-dive-12.jpg?interpolati...size=660:*]

[C C]

That finally clears up the mystery of that photo with the bomb / ships, going way back to first seeing it back in grade school. I'm pretty sure I learned later that they weren't still-active ships with crews, but both that and the image itself had faded from memory.