I wrote back to Jo after reviewing her thesis commenting as follows:
I specifically found Chapter 4, Section 4.3.1 describing the unintentional damage that anchoring and mooring create, Chapter 5, and your Reference List very interesting and informative.
One of the Michigan Underwater Preserves major goals are to provide permanent (seasonal – due to ice) mooring on the most popular wrecks in the Great Lakes.
One of the biggest issues of the Michigan Underwater Preserves is raising funds to purchase and install mooring on significant wrecks per the state and U.S. Coast Guard requirements.
Your findings on diver behavior, especially concerning contact behavior, hand pulling especially when not in current, artifact touching, and generation of artifact clusters was also informative.
In the great lakes, its infestation by the invasive Zebra (1988) and then Quagga mussels (2000) pose a serious threat to the biodiversity and fisheries of any water system. Research has also found that these mussel colonies on steel surfaces can introduce a complex community of bacteria that lowers pH levels (the lower the pH the more acidic a solution is) and speeds up the corrosion of iron fasteners and fittings on shipwrecks.
The mussels have changed the bottom land and all underwater objects like ship wrecks by enveloping them in several inch-thick carpets which obscures the shape of the object. In order to actually “see” objects, deliberate contact has been made in removing layers of mussels to enable the object to be discerned but not necessarily cleaned to it’s the surface. The sheer weight of mussels in some cases has caused structural damage to wooden wrecks. Wrecks deeper than 150 feet do not normally have thicker coverings as do the shallow ones.
In chapter 12.5, second bullet, your reference to “other types of special interest diver” has peaked my interest.
I suspect that one special interest would be photography and videography of fish and marine animals, cave systems, shipwrecks, geological formations or U/W landscapes. With the proliferation of GoPro users, I see a lot of this activity by someone on every dive.
In my area (SW Michigan) we dive rivers. In that a few large rivers connect to Great Lakes ship harbors there are ship wrecks to be found but this is not the norm. What many river divers do is called grubbing. Rivers were used as dumping grounds by the shoreline communities and businesses under the adage “out of sight, out of mind”. Now days river divers do Ecology dives where divers find and remove anything that is obviously “junk or trash” especially along the shore line or where the bottom is visible from the surface. These dives are done usually around community river parks. When not doing ecology dives, grubbers often recover anything that might have salvage value like car batteries, bikes, assorted motor vehicles, and bottles to support their diving habit.
As such I would be interested to hear what your views are on that topic and hope to hear about any future projects you undertake. Mac
Thesis: Lust for rust – Wreck divers and the management of underwater cultural heritage. Joanne Lynette Edney of Southern Cross University in Lismore, New South Wales, Australia.
