Blake Hall
The photograph above looks like an ocean, doesn’t it? The rolling waves. The whitecaps. The furious and unrelenting tide.
It isn’t though. It’s Lake Ontario — one of the famous Great Lakes of North America, formed by the movement of the Wisconsin ice sheet during the last ice age, which occurred about 12,000 years ago.
And, in this vast body of water, a centuries-old discovery was made by a bunch of inquisitive, deepwater explorers in June.
A sloop was found.
Sloop Washington, in fact. A sunken relic that was wrecked in a storm way back in 1803, with a bunch of merchants and goods from India on board. According to Shipwreck World, it’s the oldest known intact vessel found on the Great Lakes.
More from SW on how they stumbled upon it:
At the end of June our shipwreck search team was conducting a survey in the deep depths off Oswego, NY utilizing high resolution Deepvision side scan sonar. Almost immediately we came upon the sunken sloop. We made a number of scans with the side scan but the conditions were not ideal to deploy the underwater remote operated vehicle (ROV). From the sonar imagery we were fairly confident that we had discovered the sloop Washington, but we would have to wait another three weeks before the conditions on the lake were better for imaging with the ROV and confirmation of the actual wreck.
To see actual footage of the more than 200-year-old ship nestled on the lake bottom, click on the link below, right here: