Unfortunately, time was limited, and the surveying technology that was available meant that much of the fleet and the seabed around it could not be examined. It was the first archaeological and scientific look at the sunken fleet in four decades-and the first time the naval legacy of the Atomic Age was studied and shared with the public. Photographs and a detailed site plan of the Saratoga, as well as sketches of other wrecks and site descriptions for each ship, were produced by the team. Each wreck was determined to be both historically and archaeologically significant due to their unique destruction and as components of the only simulated nuclear battlefield in history. The team conducted dives on nine of the wrecks, with an emphasis on the Saratoga. The shipwrecks were not studied again until 19, when a team of archaeologists from the National Park Service’s Submerged Cultural Resources Unit conducted dives to document and evaluate the ships with support from the Navy and the Department of Energy. However, the divers had difficulty surveying the ships underwater because of poor visibility due to a thick layer of loose mud that buried much of the site and parts of the wrecks. In 1947, a scientific resurvey team conducted over 600 dives with Navy divers to some of the wrecks, focused particularly on the Saratoga, the Japanese battleship IJN Nagato, and the submarines USS Apogon and USS Pilotfish. Still, many of the effects of the blasts remained hidden beneath the lagoon. Immense efforts were undertaken to document and gauge the effects of the two detonations as they occurred. Utilizing new sonar and mapping technologies, they created the first detailed, scientific map of the submerged physical record of Operation Crossroads and its simulated naval atomic battlefield. and oceanographers from the University of Delaware made the journey back to Bikini Atoll to revisit the sunken fleet once again. In June 2019, a team of archaeologists from SEARCH Inc. While there was opposition to the tests before they were conducted and the fallout from them afterward would prove substantial, including the cancellation of a third planned test in 1947 after an inability to decontaminate the target ships following the Baker test, from a research perspective the operation led to greater understanding of nuclear power and its effects both at the time and in subsequent follow-on studies. In total, 12 of the target ships sank to the lagoon bottom, including the renowned aircraft carrier USS Saratoga. Part of Operation Crossroads, a massive-scale endeavor to study the effects of the new atomic weapon on a naval fleet, the two test detonations-an aerial drop from a B-29 and one suspended in the water column-codenamed Able and Baker, targeted an array of more than 90 legacy ships from World War II. In July 1946, two first-generation atomic bombs rocked the remote North Pacific island of Bikini Atoll in the Marshall Islands.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |