Tom Freeman

The battle between the USS Hatteras and the CSS Alabama on Jan. 11, 1863, as depicted in a painting by Tom Freeman.

By Douglas Main
Our Amazing Planet

On Jan. 11, 1863, a Union warship was sunk in a skirmish with a Confederate vessel in the Gulf of Mexico.

Exactly 150 years later, a new 3-D map of the USS Hatteras has been released that shows what the remains of the warship look like. The Hatteras rests on the ocean floor about 20 miles (32 kilometers) off Galveston, Texas, according to a release from the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration, which helped to sponsor the expedition to map the shipwreck.

The Hatteras was sunk in a battle with the Confederate raider CSS Alabama, and was the only Union warship sunk in combat in the Gulf of Mexico during the Civil War.

"Most shipwreck survey maps are two-dimensional and based on observations made by sight, photographs or by feeling around in murky water while stretching a measuring tape," said James Delgado, with NOAA's Office of National Marine Sanctuaries, in the statement. "Thanks to the high-resolution sonar, we have a three-dimensional map that not only provides measurements and observations, but the ability for researchers and the public to virtually swim through the wreck's exposed remains and even look below the surface at structure buried in loose silt."

Recent storms have dislodged some of the sediment that covered the ship, 57 feet (17 meters) beneath the surface, so researchers took advantage of the opportunity to map the vessel with state-of-the-art sonar in the fall of 2012, according to the statement.

The map has revealed previously unknown features of the shipwreck, including a largely intact paddlewheel that once propelled the vessel forward. It also shows damage to the wheel's steering column and the engine room.

The Hatteras rests in federal waters, and is protected under the Sunken Military Craft Act as a war grave, according to the release.

The ship was part of a blockade to prevent goods from traveling to and from Galveston, which remained one of the last bastions of the Confederacy late into the Civil War, the NOAA noted.

• Shipwrecks Gallery: Secrets of the Deep
• Disasters at Sea: 6 Deadliest Shipwrecks
• Busted: 6 Civil War Myths

Giachi et al., PNAS

A round tin box holding what may be 2,000-year-old tablets from the Roman shipwreck Relitto del Pozzino. (Right: contents of the tin box.)

By Charles Choi
LiveScience

Ancient gray disks loaded with zinc and beeswax found aboard a shipwreck more than 2,000 years old may have been used as medicine for the eyes, researchers say.

These new findings shed light on the development of medicine over the centuries, scientists added.

Scientists analyzed six flat gray tablets about 1.6 inches (4 centimeters) in diameter and 0.4 inches (1 cm) thick that were found in a round tin box aboard the so-called Relitto del Pozzino shipwreck, which was discovered about 60 feet (18 meters) underwater in 1974 on the seabed of the Baratti Gulf off the coast of Tuscany. The hull, only 50 to 60 feet (15 to 18 m) long and about 10 feet (3 m) wide, dated back to about 140 B.C.

The Roman shipwreck lay near the remains of the Etruscan city of Populonia, which at the time the ship foundered was a key port along sea trade routes between the west and east across the Mediterranean Sea. A number of artifacts were unearthed during the excavation, including wine jars, an inkwell, tin and bronze jugs, stacks of Syrian-Palestinian glass bowls and Ephesian lamps. [ Shipwrecks Gallery: Secrets of the Deep ]

"Such objects suggest that the ship, or at least a great part of its cargo, came from the east, probably the Greek coasts or islands," the researchers wrote in a study detailed online Monday in the journal the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The cargo also included medical equipment, such as an iron probe and a bronze vessel that may have been used for bloodletting or for applying hot air to soothe aches. These findings suggest a physician was traveling by sea with his professional equipment, the researchers said.

To learn more about these potentially medicinal tablets, researchers investigated the chemical, mineralogical and botanical composition of fragments of a broken tablet.

"In archaeology, the discovery of ancient medicines is very rare, as is knowledge of their chemical composition," the researchers wrote. "The data revealed extraordinary information on the composition of the tablets and on their possible therapeutic use."

The disks were about 80 percent inorganic, with zinc making up about 75 percent of the inorganic components. Zinc compounds have been known since ancient times to serve as medicines, with the ancient Roman naturalist Pliny the Elder writing that they could help treat the eyes and skin.

The tablets also contained starch, pine resin, beeswax and a mix of plant- and animal-derived fats, perhaps including olive oil. Starch was a known ingredient of Roman cosmetics, olive oil was used for perfumes and medicines, and pine resin may have kept the oil from going rancid and fought microbes due to its antiseptic properties.

Pollen grains were numerous, with about 1,400 grains per gram seen in the tablets. These came from olive, wheat and many other plants, such as stinging nettles and alder trees. However, about 60 percent of this pollen came from plants that are pollinated by insects such as bees, suggesting they may inadvertently have hitched along in a bee product such as beeswax instead of getting intentionally added to the medicine.

Linen fibers were seen, which may have helped keep the tablets from crumbling. Charcoal was detected as well, which may be residue from other ingredients or was potentially added intentionally.

Intriguingly, the Latin word for eyewash, "collyrium," derives from a Greek word meaning "small round loaves." This fact highlights the notion that these small round tablets are linked with eye health.

"This study provided valuable information on ancient medical and pharmaceutical practices and on the development of pharmacology and medicine over the centuries," the researchers said. "In addition, given the current focus on natural compounds, our data could lead to new investigations and research for therapeutic care."

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• Disasters at Sea: 6 Deadliest Shipwrecks
• In Photos: Diving for Famed Roman Shipwreck
• In Photos: Amazing Ruins of the Ancient World

Hellenic Ephorate of Underwater Antiquities and WHOI

The Antikythera wreck is famed for the massive number of artifacts pulled from the site over the past century. Here divers explore the site.

By Stephanie Pappas, LiveScience

A dive to the undersea cliff where a famous Roman shipwreck rests has turned up either evidence that the wreck is enormous — or a suggestion that, not one, but two sunken ships are resting off the Greek island of Antikythera.

"Either way, it's an exciting result," said study researcher Brendan Foley, an archaeologist at Woods Hold Oceanographic Institution who presented the findings here at the annual meeting of the Archaeological Institute of America in Seattle.

The Antikythera wreck is famed for the massive number of artifacts pulled from the site over the past century. First discovered in the early 1900s by local sponge divers, the wreck is most famous for the Antikythera mechanism, a complex bronze gear device used to calculate astronomical positions (and perhaps the timing of the Olympic games). Numerous bronze and marble statues, jars and figurines have also been pulled from the wreck. The ship went down in the first century B.C.

Remote wreck
The wreck is perched on a steep undersea cliff in water too deep for standard scuba gear. The undersea landscape also makes deploying remotely operated submersibles impossible, Foley said. In 1976, Jacques Costeau led a diving expedition to the site. Since then, it has been unexplored, thanks in part to its remote location in the strait between Crete and Peloponnese.

"This place is absolutely unspoiled," Foley said.

Led by Aggeliki Simossi, the director of the Greek Ephorate of Underwater Antiquities, Foley and colleagues from Greece and Woods Hole watched footage and pored over logs from the 1976 dive. With so many artifacts already taken from the site, they knew there would be little evidence of the shipwreck exposed on the ocean floor. They'd have to match the underwater geology to find the wreck.

In October, diving with technical scuba gear and diver propulsion vehicles that look like underwater fans, the team found the sweet spot, marked by a scattering of amphora, or large curved jars. [See Photos of the Antikythera Shipwreck]

Intact artifacts from the wreck were spread over a huge area, about 197 feet long at depths ranging from 114 feet to 197 feet, Foley said. That's large for an ancient shipwreck, Foley said, suggesting either a huge ship or perhaps more than one wreck. The findings are preliminary, Foley said, but the team may have ultimately been excavating 984 feet away from the site explored by Cousteau. If that's the case, he said, they may have found a separate wreck — likely part of the same fleet as the original wreck that went down in the same storm.

More secrets
One reason for the researchers' uncertainty is the fact that they used Costeau's Antikythera expedition videos to gauge where to anchor their boat. Since some of the shots in the video were almost certainly staged, the researchers can't be sure they weren't diving at a site hundreds of yards away from the site explored in 1976.

Either way, the wreck site has many more artifacts to offer, the researchers found. They pulled one jar to the surface, which will undergo DNA testing to determine its contents. They also recovered two components of a lead anchor, which itself was resting on top of other artifacts, suggesting it was on deck when the ship went down.

"What else could be down there?" Foley said. "Are there more pieces of the known Antikythera mechanism? Is there another mechanism down there?"

The researchers plan to return to the area next year and will use metal detectors to check the site almost 1,000 feet away where Costeau's team may have really been, he said. There are no artifacts visible on the ocean floor other than the spot that Foley and his colleagues explored, but metal detectors should pick up on any remnants under the sand at the other site if there are in fact two wrecks. [The 7 Most Mysterious Archaeological Finds]

What's more, the technical scuba gear may also allow archaeologists to dive deeper and more extensively in the future, Foley added. The dream, he told LiveScience, is to find an "undisturbed Antikythera," or a significant wreck that hasn't been disrupted for decades.

"Because the site has been so intruded upon for more than a century it gets really hard to disambiguate what's myth and what's fact," Foley said.

Follow Stephanie Pappas on Twitter @sipappas or LiveScience @livescience. We're also on Facebook& Google+.

• Shipwrecks Gallery: Secrets of the Deep
• Disasters at Sea: 6 Deadliest Shipwrecks
• In Photos: Amazing Ruins of the Ancient World

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