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A team of explorers have find the wreck of a United States Navy submarine that sank more than 60 years ago in deep water near the Hawaiian island of Oahu .
USS Stickleback , a Balao - class Cuban sandwich with the hull number SS-415 , drop on May 28 , 1958 , after an inadvertent hit with another U.S. Navy ship , the USS Silverstein . Both the Stickleback and the Silverstein were take part in an antisubmarine war exercise at the time .
Sonar scans show the wreck is broken in two parts on the seafloor. This scan shows the submarine’s conning tower and bow section.
The Stickleback is the sixth sub wreck launch by theLost 52 Project , a private group ground in New York that hopes to find all 52 of the miss U.S. submarines that sink during World War II , and all four U.S. submarines that sank during the Cold War .
The crash of the Stickleback was found rest on the seafloor under about 11,000 feet ( 3,350 metre ) of water system , according to a statementfrom recede 52 Project founder Tim Taylor . The wreckage was near the location of the collision , about 19 miles ( 30 kilometre ) from Barbers Point on Oahu , grant to theNaval account and Heritage Command ( NHHC ) of the U.S. Navy .
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USS Stickleback was holed in a collision with destroyer escort USS Silverstein when it surfaced in an emergency during a naval exercise in 1958.
Submarine sinking
USS Stickleback was commissioned in 1945 , toward the destruction of World War II , and had been on patrol in the Sea of Japan for only a few days when the ceasefire with Japan was agreed .
The submarine was decommission in June 1946 and attached to the Pacific Reserve Fleet for five year . It was recommissioned in 1951 after the start of the Korean War , and from 1953 it was post at Pearl Harbor in Hawaii . In May 1958 , the Stickleback took part in a naval war exercise near Oahu . The poor boy had just completed a faux hero run on USS Silverstein when it dead lost power and sank uncontrollably to a depth of nearly 800 foot ( 244 m ) , according to the NHHC .
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The Stickleback ’s gang dumped compact airwave into the pigboat ’s ballast cooler until the vessel ascend again and breached the open — but now it was only 200 yard ( 180 m ) forward of the come near Silverstein . The Silverstein stress to avoid the Stickleback by reversing its engines and channelize severely left , but the vessels collided and the submarine suffer a devastating hole on its left side .
Luckily , the entire crew of the Stickleback escaped onto the Silverstein and other ship nearby , and everyone survived . Navy ship tried to keep the Stickleback on the surface by passing cables under it , but the sub flooded with H2O and go down after several hours .
Robert Neyland , the head of underwater archaeology for the NHHC , said the Lost 52 Project know the general location of where the Stickleback sink in 1958 , but they had to explore the surrounding seafloor to find the wreck . " Sometimes those positions are n’t entirely accurate … specially when thing are happening rapidly , people can make fault with numbers , " Neyland enjoin Live Science .
Historic wreck
Sonar scan show the Stickleback is now break in half , with its fore and stern sections lie in on the seafloor almost 1,000 foot ( 300 m ) aside . The search for the wreck was carry out first by an autonomous submersed vehicle ( AUV ) , which is equipped with sonar equipment to scan the seafloor . prey sites give away by the AUV were then investigate with a tethered remotely operated vehicle ( ROV ) , which can send back live video recording to the lookup ship on the surface , according to theNational Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration .
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Underwater video and a detailed 3D paradigm of the wreck compiled from multiple photographs show that the wreck is in good condition , probably as a consequence of its great depth , Neyland allege . " you may read the name , you may see the hull act , that ’s remarkable — you would n’t have that kind of preservation in shallow water , " he said .
The U.S. Navy remains the owner and coach of all its recessed warships and aircraft , but the vast number of crash means the NHHC is n’t able to keep a close-fitting spotter on all of them : " Our book are passably full , " Neyland pronounce .
Some of the wrecks need environmental management , or could reveal detail that explicate why the vessel sank , while many others are warfare graves that comprise the stiff of people who died on them , he enounce . That means that individual efforts to find naval wreck , like the Lost 52 Project andsimilar body of work by the recent Paul Allen ’s Vulcan Inc.on the R / V Petrel , are especially important .
" This is a great helper , " Neyland say . " It ’s something that we would do as metre and resource allow , but I do n’t hump when we would have gotten to look for Stickleback or many of these other submarines . "
to begin with print onLive Science .
