SILVER SPRING, MARYLAND—A team of specialists from the Naval History and Heritage Command and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration recently used ROVs to explore the wreck of the USS Macon. A lighter-than-air rigid airship that was the Navy’s last flying aircraft carrier, the Macon crashed off the coast of California eighty years ago. The U.S. Naval Institute News reports that the submersibles were able to make a photomosaic of the wreck, and took 360-degree video of a biplane that was attached to the Macon when it went down. Another task was to take measurements of corroded sections of the biplane's wing. While archaeologists and conservators have a good sense of how older, wooden shipwrecks change in underwater environments, they are still trying to understand how twentieth-century materials such as aluminum react to being submerged for long periods of time. “We haven’t quite figured out as a discipline how to best conserve the material, how those materials react with their environment and with other materials," says Naval History and Heritage Command archaeologist Alexis Catsambis. "And so this is an opportunity to learn through the sample that we collect about the rate of degradation of certain aluminum alloys and hopefully how to best help preserve them.” To read more about underwater archaeology, go to "History's 10 Greatest Wrecks."
