In the murky depths thousands of feet below the surface of the Pacific Ocean, two Japanese warships that have rested undisturbed since the Battle of Midway in World War II have been discovered.

In the past few days , deep sea explorers aboard the Petrel, a 250-foot research vessel that explores historically significant shipwrecks, announced they had located the wreckage of the Japanese carriers Kaga and Akagi, two among the six-carrier fleet used by Japanese aircraft to attack Pearl Harbor in 1941.

In June 1942, American dive-bombers attacked the carriers in one of the most famous battles in American naval history, about six months after the attack on Pearl Harbor, which prompted the formal entry of the United States into the war. It was named after the Midway Atoll, a strategic ring-shaped reef some 1,300 miles northwest of Honolulu, and was seen as a turning point for the United States in the Pacific campaign against Japan, which had naval superiority but lost four carriers in the episode.