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Treasure hunters are spurred on by the thought of finding caches of gold coins or other valuable
objects on a sunken ship.
One team of salvagers, for instance, searched the wreck of the RMS
Republic, which sank outside the Boston harbor in 1900. The search party,
using side-scan sonar, a
device that projects sound waves across the ocean bottom and produces a profile of the sea floor,
located the wreck in just two and a half days. Before the use of this new technology, such searches
could take months or years. The team of divers searched
the wreck for two months, finding silver tea
services, crystal dinnerware, and thousands of bottles of wine, but they did not
find the five and a half
tons of American Gold Eagle coins they were searching for.
Preservationists focus on the historic value of a ship. They say that even if a shipwreck's treasure does
not have a high monetary value, it can be an invaluable source of historic artifacts that are preserved
in nearly
mint condition. But once a salvage team has scoured a site, much of the archaeological
value is lost. Maritime archaeologists who are preservationists worry that the success of salvagers will
attract more treasure-hunting expeditions and thus threaten remaining undiscovered wrecks.
Preservationists are lobbying their state lawmakers to legally restrict underwater searches and
unregulated salvages. To
counter their efforts, treasure hunters argue that without the lure of gold and
million-dollar treasures, the wrecks and their historical artifacts would never be recovered at all.
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