Nearly 73 years after the Ward, an American navy destroyer, was attacked by Japanese kamikaze planes and sank in waters off the Philippines, a team aboard the research and exploration vessel Petrel gathered anxiously, all eyes fixed on screens in front of them.

It was midmorning on Dec. 1. The team, which included pilots, researchers, historians and officials from the Philippines, watched as images were beamed back to the vessel from a remotely operated submersible vehicle circling a shipwreck at the bottom of Ormoc Bay, about 650 feet below the surface .

There was not much of a current that day, so the waters were mostly clear, and slowly, the outlines of the wreck came into view. Vague shapes gave way to sharper images of the ship’s features — its deck, its wheelhouse, its bridge, its anchor davit — which were blurry with marine growth but remarkably intact.