250-Year-Old Shipwreck Found Beneath World Trade Center in New York City Stuns Archeologists
Explorers have found shipwrecks in hundreds of locations, many of them being at extreme terrains, but none shocked the community as much as finding one right beneath the Twin Towers in New York, Daily Mail reported.
The 9/11 terrorist attack on the World Trade Center shook the world causing the towers to collapse killing many people. In 2010, a rebuilding project was commissioned by authorities.
During the project, workers uncovered part of an ancient sailing ship under the site and soon archaeologists got involved, Daily Mail reported. The ship was found 22 feet (6.7 meters) below today's street level, in a pit that is now a parking complex.
Molly McDonald, an archeologist with the environmental consulting firm AKRF who was part of the project shared, "It’s such an intense site already based on its recent history, so to be in the midst of this urban, modern, very fraught location, and then to be sitting on what was a river bottom, with clams and fish, and the smell of low tide, was really an amazing juxtaposition," CNN reported.
The ship was taken by experts for analysis and it was revealed that the vessel was probably built in Philadelphia, Daily Mail reported. Tree-ring scientists at Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory were brought on board to figure out the ship's origin and age.
The team focussed on the tree rings present on the wooden skeleton of the structure for their findings, Daily Mail reported. Researchers dried the wood fragments in a cold room and made thick slices out of it, to focus on the rings.
The ring patterns and the climate record on it indicated that wood was acquired from Philadelphia in 1773.
The team published their findings in the journal, Tree Ring Research, Daily Mail reported. According to the experts, an old-growth forest in Philadelphia provided the white oak used in the ship's frames.
They discovered through the rings that the trees were cut around 1773, just a few years before the war that gave America independence from Britain.
This revelation made researchers look into parts of Independence Hall, where the Declaration of Independence and U.S. Constitution were signed, which were also made of white oak tree woods, Daily Mail reported. They managed to get their hands on wood sampled from Philadelphia’s Independence Hall two decades earlier by Lamont tree-ring scientist Ed Cook.
Growth rings in the building's timber matched the wood with which the World Trade Center ship was built. This implied that both structures were created from woods of the same area.
Experts have identified the ship to be the Hudson River Sloop, which was designed to carry passengers and cargo over shallow, rocky water, Daily Mail reported. After two or three decades of service, the ship sailed to its final resting place at Lower Manhattan, a block west of Greenwich Street. Trade pushed Manhattan’s western shoreline westward and the structure was eventually buried by trash and other landfill.
The ship vanished from site in 1818, and reappeared during excavations in 2010, Daily Mail reported. The shipwreck is now available for all to see at the State Museum in Albany, Times Union reported.