Hi everyone. Welcome to the Office of National Marine Sanctuaries' annual Get
Into your Sanctuary celebration. I am Shannon Ricles the Education and
Outreach Coordinator for Monitor National Marine Sanctuary,
and I'd like to thank you today for joining us. But before we tell you more about
our sanctuary, let's take a look at the National Marine Sanctuary System.
NOAA's National Marine Sanctuary System consists of 14 marine protected areas
that encompass more than 600,000 square miles
of marine and Great Lakes waters from Washington State to the Florida Keys and
from Lake Huron to American Samoa.
In fact did you know that the majority of the water within NOAA's national
marine sanctuaries are open to compatible and responsible recreational
activities? So if you enjoy kayaking, snorkeling,
wreck fishing, scuba diving, or just being near the water,
we invite you to visit your sanctuary system. As always, we encourage
sustainable tourism and stewardship opportunities
as these activities generate considerable benefits for our local
economies.
Now as you watch this presentation, if you have any questions during the Watch
Party please enter them into the comment section.
I'll be monitoring the questions and try to respond as quickly as I can at the
end of the presentation. There will also be an email
address at the end of the presentation where you can send any additional
questions that you might want to ask. So let's get started. Today we'd like to
welcome our presenter Tane Casserley. Tane joined the Office of
National Marine Sanctuaries in the spring of 2001,
and currently, he is the Resource Protection and Permit Coordinator for
Monitor National Marine Sanctuary. Tane holds a graduate certificate in
maritime archaeology from the University of Hawaii
and a master's degree from the Program in Maritime Studies at East Carolina
University. Tane has led NOAA archaeological
expeditions in the Florida Keys, the Great Lakes, California,
the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands, Alaska, and the USS Monitor.
He's participated in projects including a sunken
Boeing B-29 Superfortress in Lake Mead, a Civil War blockade runner in Bermuda,
the USS Arizona in Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, and was most recently part of an
expedition to the RMS Titanic. Tane's focus now is on World War II's
Battle of the Atlantic off the coast of North Carolina.
And Tane's projects have used technical diving, remotely operated vehicles,
autonomous underwater vehicles, and manned submersibles. Now before we
get started, let's test your Monitor knowledge. See
if you can answer the following three questions. You can type your answers into
the comment box as each one pops up.
So - first question.
What type of ship was the USS Monitor?
a) wooden frigate; b) sloop of war; c) ironclad. So type your answer into the
comment section.
And if you chose 'c', you were correct. It was an ironclad.
Now, when did researchers discover the USS Monitor wreck site?
a)1965; b)1973 or c) 1993
If you chose 'b', you are correct. And last question, USS Monitor battled
which ship in the Battle of Hampton Roads?
a) CSS Virginia; b) Old Ironsides; or
c) CSS Alabama.
And the answer is the CSS Virginia.
Okay. Great job everyone. It looks like some of our audience knows
quite a bit about the Monitor. But no worries if you don't, because it's time
to sit back and relax as Tane takes you back
to 1861 and the USS Monitor. Okay Tane, it is all yours.
(Tane speaking) Oh fantastic Shannon. Thank you so much. Today we're going to be talking
about America's first national marine sanctuary.
And as Shannon said I'm a maritime archaeologist. I'm also the Resource
Protection and Permit Coordinator for
the sanctuary. So the Monitor sanctuary--we're the
nation's first national marine sanctuary. We're located off the coast of
North Carolina. You can see we're right here. See my
cursor is circling it. We're about 16 miles offshore
about 230 feet of water, where the Gulf Stream current, coming
from the south, and the Labrador, coming from the north, literally collide
on top of the shipwreck site making it a really of dynamic and exciting
environment to work in and bringing in a bunch of marine life, and also makes it
very challenging for us to document the site. So let me
take you back to 1861, where it all began. So in April of 1861, Virginia seceded
from the Union, and they abandoned what was known as the
Union navies of the United States Navy's Gosport Navy Yard, which is a yard that
had naval supplies. The navy ships would come
and tie up, and they had the warehouses where all
those Navy stores of gunpowder and ammunition were there.
So the Union Navy didn't want the South, the Confederates, to get a hold of this.
So they burned everything, because they couldn't take it with them.
And one of those things they burned because they couldn't move it
at the time was the USS Merrimack, which is the steam frigate.
the Merrimack was a little bit of an older vessel steam frigate so it looked
like a sailing vessel, but actually had a steam engine in it.
It was undergoing repairs, so they chose to sink it
rather than it fall into Confederate forces. So
there's really that was all the the South had to work with.
So this gives you a little lay of the land here. So this is the Hampton Roads
area, and for those of you that don't know
it's actually an inlet from the Atlantic Ocean
to a series of rivers, to the interior of Virginia so Hampton Roads is right here.
So it's a waterway So in the south, you can watch my cursor here, this is
where the Confederates came in. This is that Gosport Navy Yard
which the Union Navy the United States Navy abandoned. But the South came up
burning everything, and they crossed the waterway here.
And they they took up station here in Newport News,
right around here, and Hampton, which is over here.
So this gives you the lay of the land. So remember, I mentioned that vessel the
USS Merrimack, so here we see it. You see it looks like a typical sailing ship.
Sails and things. There's the guns on the side,
and it had an engine. So you can see the stack right there.
So again, the Union Navy burned that, it actually sank at the dock,
and the South didn't really have ship yards. Didn't have a way of building these
massive ships. So they had to basically take what they could get.
So they raised the Virginia from the
bottom of the riverbed, and put it into this drydock, and rebuilt
it to what you see here. So now this is the CSS Virginia the Confederate vessel
made from the remains of the Merrimack, and
again they didn't have that shipyard. They didn't have those those big
Navy ways of building these massive vessels. So they
had to try to go with sort of cutting edge technology at the time.
And one of those concepts was called an ironclad. So they would basically put
iron armor around a wooden ship to help
protect it, and that's what they did here. This sort of strange looking vessel on
the bottom. Now the South didn't make it a secret
that they were building the ship, because they really wanted to
to scare the North. They wanted to scare the population of the North. They wanted
to scare the Union Navy and President Lincoln
that they were building this unstoppable sort of naval monster that nobody could stop.
It could basically steam right through a
fleet of wooden warships and destroy them without being damaged itself,
because it had those iron sides. So because the North knew this was
happening, and the South even went so far as to put it in magazines.
There's drawings and magazines and newspapers at the time where they were
showing this off to scare people. So President Lincoln put
out basically a contract asking inventors to come forward with
designs. Someone who could stop this monster. So
the man that actually won the contract was a Swedish-American inventor,
an immigrant, John Ericsson. So he was a naval engineering genius.
He was actually one of the people actually credited with designing
the screw propeller. So like you see a little outboard engine with a propeller
on it, it goes right back to John Ericsson. So
a very, very famous man, and he came up with a really weird
concept. Here's an early design we can see here
back from 1854. So it shows he's already kind of
thinking along the lines what became the Monitor.
It almost looks like a flying saucer from an old 1950s movie.
It's really strange looking, but what's new is this,
what I'm circling right here, and that's a turret. So just like you see on
battleships from World War II, they have a gun inside it and it could
move around. It could pivot all the way around so you don't have to
move the ship to actually fire on anything. You just move the turret,
and that was the new innovation, as well as the working spaces
all underneath the water line. So if you're trying to shoot this ship with a
cannonball there's not much to hit. So this is what
he came up with. This is his design to fight the CSS Virginia. This is the
USS Monitor. This is her plans, the drawings for it.
So again, it's a little different from the one we just saw. A little more
angular, a little straighter, but you can see this blue, here's the
water line, so all this, all these working spaces here, that's all
underneath the water. The only thing sticking above it was
this gun turret. So this one has two guns in it. You can see they're actually
gigantic 11-inch Dahlgren guns. They're about
12 feet long. They're just huge, but this is the first time too in really
naval history, where all the working spaces are below the
water line. So people are going to have to like psychologically get that in their mind
that they can't just take a breath in the open air. They have
to work in what they thought was an iron coffin.
So many new things are happening here. In fact, a lot of people looked at
this weird little ship, and they thought there's no way that's gonna float, right?
But John Ericsson was a very, he had a lot of pride in himself. He
was very boastful. He'd like to talk about
what a genius he was, and he says "I'm going to stand on the deck on the top of
this ship and when it slides off, (this is called the ways, which is this
ramp that goes into the water from where it's being built in the shed here), it
slides right into the waters and it's going to lay within about eight or nine inches
where it's supposed to. I bet you." And sure enough January 30th of 1862,
when it finally slid into the water for the first time
in Greenpoint, New York, it did just like he said.
So, again, just a little bit that's above the water line here, only about eight or
nine inches. So really difficult to hit with a
cannonball. You can see all the working spaces underneath the
water and there's that gun turret, the first of its kind.
So here's here's another good view of the Monitor. So you can really get a
sense of how strange the ship looked. People
called it a cheese box on a raft. So think about cheese boxes.
Like this big round wheel of cheese inside a box. It looks like
that's what it was on top of this barge essentially. It's just a strange
looking ship. But this is the precursor to all modern
naval weapons, modern naval ships. And if we put these two
ships side-by-side, you can see how different they are.
The Monitor is much smaller than the Virginia.
It actually had a lot less of the ship underneath the water too. It only went
down underneath about 12 feet or so. So it can move around in lot shallower
water. Well the Virginia you see here on the other side
was much deeper under the water. Remember these engines didn't work very well
because it was undergoing repairs when the
Union Navy tried to destroy it. But about 23 feet
underneath, what you can see here is that's where the bottom of their ship is.
So they can't move in shallow water. You can also see with the the sloping sides
that they have here, it almost looks like
a modern sort of stealth ship, right? Well, it has the same sort of purpose,
where the cannonballs would actually hit it
and ricochet off just like in modern stealth ships where the sound waves
hit her radar, and it would bounce off. So same type of technology but for a
different purpose.
So on March 8th of 1862, the CSS Virginia departs the Gosport Navy Yard
for the very first time. It's called, they call it it's maiden voyage. It's
the first time it's actually left the dock and it sails off into
Hampton Roads that I showed you before on that map, and it attacks the Union
fleet there. And it's unstoppable. So you see from the
pictures here, the CSS Virginia rams the Cumberland at
point blank range. You can see that the Cumberland is sinking
as men escape the burning warship. You can actually see people
jumping off as the CSS Virginia is right up next to
it just firing directly into the hull.
There's some more shots of that and this is really what it was like. I mean they
couldn't stop the ship. It could come right
next to it, open up with all its guns and the poor USS Cumberland
just took all those hits. So you can see the damage that's happening here and
the men trying to fight back as best they can.
They, here we see the Cumberland sinking against the men they're trying to escape.
Then the USS Congress, another warship that runs aground,
and the CSS Virginia comes up and immediately starts firing on it and sets
it on fire. There's some more views of that.
So what happened in less than eight hours on that March 8th battle,
the Virginia sank four vessels, captured a transport,
and damaged four other Union warships. So they killed over 241 Union sailors
and over a hundred wounded. This is the worst U.S. Navy defeat before Pearl Harbor
and in contrast, to show you how heavily
armored that Virginia was, it only suffered two dead and had
about a dozen wounded. So right there it shows you that this
new technology that the South was using was nearly unstoppable.
Only another iron warship could stop an iron warship.
So which brings us to the next day of March 9th of 1862.
This is when the USS Monitor is now in Hampton Roads. The night before
it steams into the area. It stops in Fort Monroe to get orders,
but all around it is illuminated by these burning Union ships.
So there's one Union vessel, USS Minnesota that
is hard aground, which means it basically hit a shoal and it's stuck
on the sand and can't move. So the Monitor is ordered to protect
that ship, and the next morning it's right there in front of it. The
Virginia comes back out to try to attack the fleet and try to sink the Minnesota,
and the battle between the Monitor and the Merrimack begins. The first clash of
the ironclads. This battle goes on for about four hours,
where each ship is coming right up next to the other one, sometimes bumping each
other, trying to ram one another, and neither ship can actually penetrate
the other one with their cannonballs. It keeps bouncing off.
So what happens eventually is that the Captain Worden
from the Monitor is hit with a bit of shrapnel when he's looking outside
the pilot house and the Monitor peels off a little bit to try to change
command, put somebody else in charge, Lieutenant Dana Green, and when they're
doing that the Virginia sees the Monitor leaving, and they think "Oh
look there's the Monitor turning tail and running. We won!"
So they turn and go back to shore and by the time the Monitor comes back with a
new commander, and they see the Virginia leaving, they
thought, "Oh look, the Virginia's leaving. We won!"
And the battle was actually a stalemate, with both sides thinking they won. But
the real loser here was the wooden warships and the
winner, if you want to call it that, was this brand new technology
that proved it was the new way forward which is ironclad
warships, metal warships, and that revolving gun turret.
So the Monitor didn't stop there even though that was the only battle between
the Virginia and the Monitor, each time that one ship tried to pull the other
one out to fight again, but they wouldn't do it because these are such precious
vessels. They didn't want to endanger them. So
the Monitor did other actions, where it helped other vessels and
shelled shore batteries, where basically a shore
battery, as you can see the South here with their guns
up on a cliff firing down, the ships that go by and try to fire them and knock
them out. That happened on May 8th of 1862. They had another action
where they helped at Drewry's Bluff where they were firing again at the
shore, and here's the Monitor right there that's all it really did.
It actually helped with support as well with the
Army withdrawal from the Battle of Malvern Hill.
But for most of its life, Monitor actually stood in
Hampton Roads, and basically guarded it to make sure it was
a safe place for ships to move in and out, and protect the Union fleet there.
And here, we see the crew sitting out on the deck on the Monitor.
Now those that live in the south in the summer will know that it's
really hot here, and as you can see this is July and August, so they're not out
here just because they're relaxing. It's so hot underneath inside
the ship. Underneath the hull here that they're
out here just to get a breath of fresh air. So they're out here cooking.
You can see the cook top here and all the crew here just relaxing
getting a little breath of fresh air and relief from that heat that's inside the ship,
which brings us to December 30th of 1862,
with the Monitor is under tow by the USS Rhode Island, that you can see
here in the background. It's a side paddle wheeler,
which means it doesn't have a propeller, it actually has these paddles here. This
paddle wheel that actually moves it along, and it's
towing the USS Monitor from Hampton Roads down to Beaufort,
South Carolina, where they start running into bigger and
bigger seas and the winds are increasing off
Cape Hatteras in North Carolina. They're battling it as best they can moving very
slowly south, until December 31st of 1862.
The waves are getting even bigger, the wind's increasing,
and finally at night the captain decides he has to
abandon ship. So he told the Rhode Island "I'm going to raise a red signal lantern
(that you can see right here on top of the turret). When you
see that we're abandoning our ship. We need help
getting the men off." So the painting here, this very famous painting,
shows the Rhode Islands crew here at a longboat pulling alongside and trying to
get the Monitor's crew off, but you can see how hard that is.
Remember the Monitor only had about eight inches above the water line, right?
So we got these 15 to 20 foot waves washing all over the deck, men being
swept off, and it's just a horrible time.
So sadly just after midnight on December 31st,
the little red signal lantern bobs once, twice,
three times, and disappears, and the Monitor is no more.
The Monitor goes to the bottom.
So the Monitor is lost history for over a hundred years until 1973,
when a group from Duke University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology,
National Geographic, and the North Carolina Department of Cultural
Resources decided to go out and test some
prototype seismic gear, which is gear they could sort of image
the sea floor. And they wanted to prove how effective
it was by looking for a very particular ship with a very particular shape.
And that was the USS Monitor so in 1973 they go out and as it happens for some
reason on every one of these types of projects,
you find something on the very last day that you're out there. So on that very
last day, they find what they think, they call is a
long amorphous echo, and that's what a side scan sonar
kind of gives you, it gives you an image from sound
and there it is right there, but it's a strange looking thing.
You know, and one of the reasons that it immediately didn't say it was the Monitor,
because they expected to see the turret on top, and what they didn't expect
was the turret was underneath the Monitor. So when
everything finally clicked, and they realized the ship was upside down, the
turret was underneath it, they said, "Oh my lord, we found it." So on
March 8th 1974, after looking over a year looking at the
data, they announced they officially found the USS Monitor.
The Monitor was interesting because it actually lies
way out of state waters. State waters are only three miles from shore
and everything beyond that was seen as the high seas. Sort of a 'no man's land'.
So NOAA had just passed a few years before something called the
National Marine Sanctuaries Act. It was really set up to protect very
special places in the oceans, in the Great Lakes that
protected sort of things in the natural beauty, like coral
reefs, endangered species, whales, things like that, but there's a
little bit of a clause in there that said they also protected
archaeological cultural resources and that's how the Monitor became
the very first national marine sanctuary on January 30th in 1975.
That's the 113th anniversary of the Monitor's launch from Greenpoint, New York.
So it was really exciting during these early years
investigating the site, diving on the shipwreck, this is kind of a time
in marine science when people are trying all sorts of new technologies one of
those was working with these research submarines. So you can see
it right here. It's the Harbor Branch vessel, and you can see there's a big
bubble right here. That's where the people go
inside and this back part actually had an area where these divers
could lock themselves out wearing a helmet,
a little emergency tank, and then an air hose, and he could
dive outside of this submarine. Leave the submarine,
and then walk on the sea floor, and document the site. So it's just
incredible, incredible work. And one of the first
artifacts actually discovered on the site was that red signal lantern. That
same one that signaled the Monitor was sinking to the Rhode Island.
It was actually the very first artifact ever found on the site, and it was laying
just off the bow. So that was, we did a whole archaeological research plan.
We had funding in place. We worked with the Smithsonian, and we
recovered the lantern, and had it conserved. Now you can
see it on display at The Mariners' Museum and Park in Newport News,
Virginia, as well as the Monitor's anchor, you can see here that was brought
up in 1983. But what they had realized looking at
Monitor for all these years was it's an iron warship, and if you know
anything about iron and salt water, saltwater corrodes iron pretty quickly.
So they thought, if we need to save part of
these shipwrecks to bring it up and share with the American people,
what are we going to do? Hhow do we do that? So what are we going to recover?
So they decided that the most iconic part of the Monitor is that
rotating gun turret, right? That's the first one in history in the world,
that went to battle and proved that these turrets with the guns inside
was the way forward. So and that's the great, great
grandfather essentially of all big modern naval guns.
That's the Monitor's. So they decided that's what we need to get.
But it's underneath the ship so they had to cut away part of the armor belt.
They decided to get the engine as well because it's another John Ericsson
design. It's really iconic, as well as the propeller too, because
don't forget, not only was it designed by
John Ericsson for the Monitor, but he is also
credited with one of the people who designed the very first propellers, so
very important. So in 1998, we worked with the U.S. Navy and the Navy divers at
MDSU-2, which is out of Little Creek, Virginia. You can see
this is the drawing of the propeller here.
You see my cursor and here it is as we brought it up.
Here is underwater and now you can see it actually on display at
The Mariners' Museum and Park, so it's just wonderful.
Now the engine, we had to get the engine so the engine was actually on top of the
turret. So you can see here on the left, a very
large structure. You can see it here in the video
underwater. We put it over the the aft end or the back end of the
Monitor, the tail end, lowered a little frame down across the
hull attached that little frame, there you can
see it drop down to the engine, cut it away and then drew
it all the way up. And that you can see it right there.
That was in 2001.
And then the next year 2002, now we're going after the gun turret.
So we remove part of the decking and the armor belts, swung them off the side and
just drop them gently on the sea floor. And now it's ready to go, but it wasn't,
because what we had thought was basically just a little bit of sand in
there, we realized that one of the Monitor's coal bunkers, which
is a storage area, bunkers area a storage area where they would keep the coal that ran
the engines, actually broke open and dumped its
entire contents into the turret. So now we had to excavate that. Remove
that gently because now it was too heavy to lift.
So we worked again with the U.S. Navy divers, and
we did that excavation being very gentle, because there was a chance we might find
sailors in there, human remains. And here's the big recovery structure we
used. We call it the 'spider'. So you can see it here,
right here. See my cursor. We call it the 'spider' because it looks like that with
those eight giant legs that would open up
and grasp the turret and then move it over to what we called here the platform,
which is this big circular piece. And the two pieces would seriously sandwich
together with the turret inside it keeping it
safe so everything stayed inside there.
And again you heard me talking about the U.s. Navy and the U.S. Navy divers, and we
couldn't have done this without them. And this video shows a fantastic shot of
the Johnson Sea Link 2, the Harbor Branch submersible. You can
see a Navy diver walking along the armor belt of the
Monitor, and then here's the armor belt cut away, and then there's
that spider structure with a turret inside it. So this is just before the
recovery. But just incredible work and we're so thankful for their
partnership with us. But I should also mention that NOAA has
its own dive team as well. So we're technical divers. This is, you
know, quite a long time ago, but we were wearing
big double tanks on our back with tri-mix, which is a mixture of sort of
helium, oxygen, and nitrogen. We would carry decompression tanks under our arms,
because it's so deep we had to decompress slowly as we came up
so we wouldn't get bends. But we would go down there and we would document the
site before the Navy went there, help recover artifacts if they're
there. So you kind of think we're sort of the scalpel
and the Navy was the chainsaw essentially, but we worked hand-in-hand
together. It worked very well. Here's an example of
the giant barge that we had on site. This big, big crane to pick up the turret,
and here's that spider structure right here that
platform. And on August 5th of 2002
the turret was recovered after a 45-day project. A total weight of over 230 tons.
When it finally broke the surface, it was a fantastic day for all of us!
But most of us think that "oh hey you guys went out, you dove on the shipwrecks,
did all this exciting work, you brought it up, and now you're done, right?
You're finished." Well that's only the start of the project. About
75 percent of the project still has to go to conserve and excavate the turret,
the engine, and all the other pieces of parts. So incredible amount of work.
Still ongoing. So we worked hand-in-hand with conservators from The Mariner's
Museum and Park, again in Newport News, and we excavated the turret, being very
gentle to remove any of that coal that's
still in there, sort of the mud and any of those type of things.
We actually found a lantern that lit the turret the night
it sank right here. This is actually Wayne Lusardi,
who was working for the museum, is now works for the State of Michigan,
and he's stationed at Thunder Bay National Marine Sanctuary in Alpena
Michigan.
Then as well, it's how do you map this thing? It's 22 feet across
and nine feet tall. It's incredibly big. So we based it like it was a land
excavation, we set up lines. We're very lucky that it was
basically, we've got lines that go across here with
these frames across. And then these other ones that are up
and down. So it created this grid structure just as we have in archaeological
land excavation. And I should mention, we actually did
find two sailors inside the turret as well, that both lost
their lives during the night of the sinking. You can
kind of see them here, this representation.
They were possibly waiting, you know, for the lifeboat to come.
They were lit by that lantern that you saw on the previous screen,
and, you know, we took every care we could to help excavate them working with
the military, who took the lead, and we assisted them
with the recovery of these two sailors.
But this is a great example of how you document these things. This is actually a
laser scan. You can see here of the interior. The
laser sort of documents the surface of the interior of the turret because
it's so difficult to really to map that in such high detail. So we worked with
the highest technology we could to do that.
And also I can't say enough about our partnership with The Mariners' Museum
and Park. That we have this beautiful facility,
the USS Monitor center that tells the story of the U.S. Navy and the ironclads
and the Monitor. There's a full-scale reproduction of the
USS Monitor out back of it that you can walk the
deck of, made by the Apprentice School from the Newport News
shipyard, and it's just gorgeous. And then a gigantic conservation
facility the Baton Conservation facility. It's probably the biggest metals
conservation facility in the entire country.
So inside here you can see in this picture, this is the turret. it's inside a
giant tank. We have the engine, the condenser is over here, the guns are
just on the other side in separate tanks. And you can see these windows because we
made a really special effort to make sure the public could view this
whole processes that went on because it takes so long to conserve
these items. I mean the turret could take another 10 to 15
years, and we want to make sure the public can see that the whole time too.
So there's all these little viewing angles right here so people can peer in
and see what's going on. This is upstairs in the clean lab. It
almost looks like something out of NASA So it's just just phenomenal.
And we have to remember that you know there's a people story too. You know we
have a gold ring that one of the sailors was
wearing, their buttons, U.S. Navy, USN, their boots.
You know, sort of these bottles of relish and ketchup, just like in
MREs today with the military there's a little thing of Tabasco to help the food
taste better. The U.S. Navy did that in the Civil War too. You know, ketchup,
relish, mustard, anything to make the food taste better.
Here's more of those human connections too, that we have to remember
that these were human beings associated with this that perished,
that died in the sinking. And these are a lot of the sailors,
the officers, actually, their silverware, and they would have
the silverware engraved with their initials because oftentimes the
officers would come to the ship and bring their own silverware. So that's how
you could track it. So we actually found theirs and all, actually
the officers, that died during the sinking, we have
a representation of their silverware from each one of them.
So it's very special.
And just to show you how complex this is too. So here's the engine in 2010
to show you it's all covered with concretions and coral and marine growth.
So that's all got to get removed, and then we take the whole thing apart to
conserve it and put it back together again. So it's a massive job.
So I'll take you through these years to show how it changed from 2010 to 2017,
how long this process takes. So we tear little by little it's getting cleaner
and cleaner. Looking a bit better, even more so,
and now there it is in 2017. So all the concretion is missing.
It's down to the bare metal but now the whole thing has to be taken apart,
conserved separately, then put back together again. So again
it's definitely worth it, but it's a lot of work.
And then there's the turret as well too. Can't forget that, so here's
some of the conservation staff inside working on the interior of the turret
here. You know making sure it's conserved well.
Again working with the highest technology we can,
this is a digital scan getting you know accuracy within millimeters
of the reconstruction of the turret here. So we know exactly what's
happening with it.
Again, here's more examples of that doing that.
And also the ongoing conservation. So they actually put in
a low-level electrical current through the turret,
and those electrons and electricity help push out the sodium chloride ions, or
salts, pushed out of the metal. So they fill it with fresh water, put the
electrical current through, touches the metal, draws out the salt,
then they clean out the drain the tank, filter out the water, and
put it back again. So it's just a long, long ongoing process but it's the safest
thing for the turret. It'll be the best thing for it in the
long term. And we can't forget about those two
sailors. These two sailors that I mentioned,
we worked with the United States Navy and the Veterans Administration, and we're
very proud to now have our two sailors buried in Arlington
National Cemetery. We did a huge ceremony with the Navy on March 8th
2013. It's 151 years after the Battle Hampton Roads and 10,000
people showed up as we celebrated and honored these men who perished. We're
not sure who they are at the moment, but we have our tombstone here that we
honored all of the men that died during the night of the
sinking.
So we're very lucky though to be able to partner with Louisiana State University,
and we had done scans of the two skulls of the sailors,
and they recreated them in resin. And then working with Louisiana State
University, they remolded their faces - what we think their
faces look like. So here are two individuals right here this is
our best bet, our belief on what they look like.
And one of them is possibly, you know, it's up to you to decide, but
maybe Robert Williams who's a Welshman who died during the sinking. But you can
see if you look at the recreation here the cut of the jaw, the nose, the
cheekbones, and we look here at the short historic photo right there,
very, very similar. It's also very tall too. You can see him right here.
So we we have a good feeling that it could be Williams, but we just don't know
yet. But I like to think it is. And so the Monitor is still a vibrant
site today. You know, we invite people to enjoy it.
You can get a permit. You can dive there. It's very easy to do. We can
come by and fish and enjoy yourself. We've got a data buoy at the site
sharing real-time marine data with people all up and down
coastal North Carolina. You know, which is wonderful.
And here's the Monitor shipwreck site today. So it's still a fantastic
dive site. Still so many stories yet to tell.
And it's also a really thriving vibrant artificial reef, so all towards
all sorts of marine life fish and all sorts of things now call this home. So
it's sort of gone from a weapon of war to now an oasis of life, and we're really
proud to keep telling Monitor stories and to
encourage people to visit it and and visit our partners institutions and
aquariums, museums across the country to learn more about the USS Monitor.
And there we are, the Monitor National Marine Sanctuary today 16 miles off the
coast of Cape Hatteras, North Carolina, and we invite everybody
to learn more about it. Shannon back to you.
(Shannon speaking) Thank you Tane that
was very interesting. I really appreciate such a thorough and
great presentation. All right, let me get us back to
let us get us back to my screen. Let me
change back to presenter here. All right and I'm going to go from
current slide.
All right. Well thank you again Tane. So while the Get Into Your Sanctuary events
are being held virtually this year in response to the health and safety
concerns due to COVID-19, our sanctuary waters have remained open
for responsible use in accordance with CDC guidance and local regulations.
More information on the response from NOAA's Office of National Marine
Sanctuaries can be found on the website that's there listed,
sanctuaries.noaa.gov/coronavirus
If you do get a chance to experience a national marine sanctuary this summer or
at any time, please share your photos on social media
and use the hashtag #ILoveMySanctuary or
#RecreateResponsibly. And for all you photographers out there,
we have an annual photo contest that is open until
September 7th. So be sure to go to the website and learn more about how you can
submit your your images. There's also multiple
categories that you can enter. Now if you enjoyed this presentation, be
sure to join us throughout this weekend to watch
more and to learn about the great things that you can do and see across
your national marine sanctuary system and to plan your next visit.
So thank you for joining us. For more information about the Monitor National
Marine Sanctuary go to monitor.noaa.gov and if you have any questions for Tane
or for myself, be sure to email them at monitor@noaa.gov.
as is it's there on your screen. Thank you so much for joining us
today, we really appreciate your time and thank you again Tane for just the
wonderful presentation. So have a wonderful day everyone and
Get Into Your Sanctuary! (Tane speaking) Thanks everybody.