Discovering the Past, Today
The Argos is going to look at sunken ships in the Black Sea.
The Argos is a robot explorer, for anyone who’s not familiar with it. And its owner/operator, Robert Ballard, is going to look at some very well preserved ships from the Byzantine era. According to this article on Wired News, these 1,500 year-old ships are preserved so well due to a lack of oxygen. Apparently, the little beasties that ravage shipwrecks can’t survive in an oxygen-free environment.
So, it looks like scientists are going to get a much better picture of what life was like in the Byzantine era. The researchers are hoping for everything from cargo to documents that might shed some light on the people who were running around at the time the ship sank. They might even be able to prove the “world flood” that seemed to take place and was recorded as the Flood that Noah survived in the Bible. Kind of cool.
