The ‘Holy Grail of Shipwrecks’ Is Still Underwater. So Is Its $17 Billion Fortune.
The ‘Holy Grail of Shipwrecks’ Is Still Underwater. So Is Its $17 Billion Fortune.
www.popularmechanics.com
The ‘Holy Grail of Shipwrecks’ Is Still Underwater. So Is Its $17 Billion Fortune.
So why hasn't someone salvaged the gold coins yet? Seems odd, and the article offers no answer.
Colombia has declared it an important cultural heritage site; a limited archeological survey is underway while techniques are developed to allow for the excavation and preservation of the site. (Edit: the first artefacts were recovered a few days ago!). There's also lots (30+ years) of lawsuits and drama that is too tedious to summarize but everyone sucks (although imo its good that the Colombian government seems to have emerged victorious over SSA, after umpteen years of them being just total dicks to each other. Go check out the wikipedia page, it's pretty fun.)
As to why it hasn't been looted, the location has been kept a secret but we can guess it's down -deep- deep, by the type of UUV (AUV?) used in the discovery. This means that anyone who knows where it is still has to have the resources to actually go down and loot it, and ultra-deep equipment like that is pretty hard to come by.
This guy loots.
Can u tell me where I can find some treasures closer to the surface:) ty
It says it was located 600m down in 2015. That's not too bad, military subs have a max depth of like 400m, but deep sea submersibles can get to like 11km. An remote vehicle would be much cheaper at this depth, and wealthier financiers could easy afford salvage expeditions.
But where it was located is not public information. That limits it's salvaging opportunity immensely. I would also suspect that Columbia has spent some effort securing the salvage, if they can't afford to retrieve it.
Thank you for the insight.
It's 600m below the surface. Humans can only dive to 200m max, so you need submersibles and a huge salvage operation to gather everything.
Sounds like that would cost <17billion though?