DIVE ALERT: Diving Now on WWII Wreck, USS Independence Tonight, Dr. Robert Ballard, and the crew of the E/V Nautilus will conduct the first visual survey the USS Independence, a World War II era naval ship and former aircraft carrier, once used in the atomic tests at Bikini Atoll in the Pacific. Independence was scuttled offshore of San Francisco in 1951, rediscovered as the deepest shipwreck in GFNMS, and acoustically mapped by NOAA in 2015 using autonomous underwater vehicles. Nautilus will also image the ship for photomosaic and microbathymetry data.



Resting in 2,600 feet of water off California's Farallon Islands, the carrier is "amazingly intact," say NOAA scientists, with its hull and flight deck clearly visible, and what appears to be a plane in the carrier's hangar bay.



Independence (CVL 22) operated in the central and western Pacific from November 1943 through August 1945 and later was one of more than 90 vessels assembled as a target fleet for the Bikini Atoll atomic bomb tests in 1946. Damaged by shock waves, heat and radiation, Independence survived the Bikini Atoll tests and, like dozens of other Operation Crossroads ships, returned to the United States.



While moored at San Francisco's Hunters Point Naval Shipyard, Independence was the primary focus of the Navy's studies on decontamination until age and the possibility of its sinking led the Navy to tow the blast-damaged carrier to sea for scuttling on Jan. 26, 1951. Learn more at http://sanctuaries.noaa.gov/shipwrecks/independence/



Join us LIVE on www.nautiluslive.org to ask your questions to the team throughout the dive!