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nradovtoday at 4:42 AM2 repliesview on HN

It would be great to see more underwater archaeology, I'm sure there's a lot to find. But due to variations in local conditions it's really tough to systematically investigate: every site has to be treated individually. Plus doing anything underwater becomes at least 10× harder and more expensive. Human scientific divers can only work easily down to about 30m: anything significantly deeper requires commercial diving protocols, submersibles, or ROVs which raise the difficulty and cost even further.


Replies

awesome_dudetoday at 7:00 AM

The Australians have found a few sites between Australia and Papua New Guinea/Indonesia

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2023-06-28/underwater-ancient-ab...

Empacttoday at 5:46 AM

I mean something more of the sort of a survey of sea floor and subsurface which would have been coastline at the glacial maxima, boats trawling multispectral scanners to identify candidate locations. There are a few different recent systems that push in the direction of this being feasible, e.g. https://www.usgs.gov/programs/cmhrp/news/usgs-designed-tool-...