World War II aircraft carrier the U.S.S. Independence, which was sunk during atomic bomb tests off the coast of Northern California, has been rediscovered by scientists.
The ship was found about 30 miles off the coast near the Farallon Islands during a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration mission to
map about 300 historic shipwrecks in the area, The Associated Press reported.
The ship appears to have a plane in its hangar.
"This ship fought a long, hard war in the Pacific, and after the war, was subjected to two atomic blasts that ripped through the ship," NOAA scientist James Delgado said, according to the AP.
Scientists described the ship as "amazingly intact,"
according to an NOAA press release.
After the atomic blasts, the ship was used to study nuclear decontamination before being towed to sea and sunk.
Details about Independence were collected by a 3-D sonar called
Echoscope carried by the Echo Ranger underwater autonomous vehicle, Wired reported. The wreckage was an ideal site to test the new technology, which found that the ship’s hull and flight deck to be in good shape.
Researchers discovered the wreck in March at a depth of roughly 2,600 feet. An earlier survey conducted in 2009 found something that may have been the Independence, but couldn’t be confirmed, Wired said.
Delgado called the ship’s intact state “remarkable,”
according to the San Francisco Chronicle.
“After 64 years on the seafloor, Independence sits on the bottom as if ready to launch its planes,” he said.
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