The Treasure-seekers

Odyssey marine's seabed discoveries

‘When I first set my eyes on a wreck it is truly amazing, sometimes the hairs on the back of neck stand up’ Neil Cunningham Dobson, Odyssey Principle Marine Archaeologist

In the last hundred years man’s quest for discovery has known no bounds. We have visited tranquility base, conquered the highest peaks on Earth and re-created the beginning of the universe. Yet we are a long way from discovering the thousands of mysteries that lie a lot closer to home.

Water is vital to life and covers 60 per cent of the area of Earth. But travel less than 1,000ft below the ocean's surface and the effect can be fatal, the pressure causing your body to crush itself. That’s not enough to keep a good archaeologist down though.

Up until recently, other than Jacques Cousteau it was rare that underwater exploration gained many column inches. But with their fantastic discoveries, run-ins with foreign governments and utilising the most technologically advanced equipment to survey the oceans, the employees of Odyssey have changed this.

In less than 20 years, the Florida-based marine exploration company has surveyed over 10,000 square miles of seabed and spent more than 9,000 hours diving shipwreck sites. Its hundreds of discoveries have spanned over two millennia – from U boats and colonial warships to a 3rd century BC Punic site.

To boldly go where no man has gone before

Marine archaeology is staggeringly complex. While on the land, it can take dozens of people months to uncover a few metres of earth around a site – which has to be protected from the elements at all times – underwater the hazards increase exponentially. The ocean floor is not a pristine environment protecting a treasure. It is inhospitable, constantly on the move and has torn apart many shipwrecks.

In 1990, Odyssey co-founders Greg Stemm and John Morris directed the world’s first robotic deep sea excavation on a Spanish colonial shipwreck, lost in 1622, 1,500 feet underwater and 70 miles away from the coast of Key West in....

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