A proposed National Marine Sanctuary in Lake Michigan is nearing reality.

On Friday, Jan. 6, the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) announced plans to designate up to 1,260 square miles of Lake Michigan along the Wisconsin coastline as the second marine sanctuary in the Great Lakes had entered a multi-month public review phase.

Public review is one of the final steps in designation of a maritime cultural history project that's been under development for several years.

"Progress is exciting," said Tamara Thomsen, a maritime archeologist with the Wisconsin Historical Society who has helped spearhead the project.

"It's a long and arduous road but we're continuing to plod ahead."

The proposed waters off Wisconsin contain 38 known and 95 potential shipwrecks, including the famous "Christmas Tree Ship" wreck of the schooner Rouse Simmons and a sunken freighter filled with vintage Nash automobiles.

The area holds Wisconsin's two oldest known shipwrecks discovered to date, the Gallinipper, which sank in 1833, and the Home, which sank in 1843. More than 15 of the wrecks are on the National Register of Historic Places.

The shipwreck graveyard was nominated to a shortlist of potential new sanctuaries in 2014 and began the formal designation process in 2015. It would be the 15th national sanctuary and the newest designation since 2000.

The Wisconsin-Lake Michigan National Marine Sanctuary would be the second such federally protected area of shipwrecks in the Great Lakes. The first, the Thunder Bay National Marine Sanctuary in Lake Huron, was designated in 2000 and expanded from 448 square miles to 4,300 square miles in 2014.

Marine sanctuaries adhere to guideline standards of resource protection, research and education. Buoys mark wrecks and give dive boats something to anchor to as opposed to dragging along the bottom.

The Thunder Bay sanctuary headquarters in Alpena features a shipwreck museum and glass-bottom boat tours of shallow wrecks. It has become a tourist destination for divers and maritime history on Michigan's sunrise side.

However, aside from some expected socio-economic benefits to the communities fronting the protected waters, Thomsen said a Wisconsin sanctuary would not likely parallel Thunder Bay in structure. Instead of a centrally located museum, there would likely be multiple outreach centers in cities along the coast.

"We already have a nationally recognized maritime museum in that area," she said, the Wisconsin Maritime Museum in Manitowoc.

"We have five distinct communities along this coastline and three counties," she said, including the cities of Two Rivers, Port Washington and Sheboygan.

"To copy exactly what they have in Alpena is not realistic. How it will look is still being formed. That's part of what's coming in this comment period."

NOAA is soliciting feedback on, among other things, the total size of the sanctuary boundary. The proposed area has grown from 875 square miles to 1,260 square miles in an alternative that would include the coast of Kenwunee County. A boundary that doesn't include that county is about 1,075 square miles.

The current review stage involves gathering input from the public, project partners, tribes and other stakeholders to consider in the final project design.

Public meetings are scheduled in Wisconsin in March. Public comment is being accepted until March 31. The comment window opens Jan. 9.

The Wisconsin-Lake Michigan sanctuary is one of five such projects under various stages of development around the Great Lakes, including two in Lake Superior, two in Lake Erie and one in Lake Ontario.

A proposed Maryland sanctuary along a 52-square-mile stretch of the tidal Potomac River also reached the public review phase this year.

The Mallows Bay area contains more than 100 known and yet-to-be-discovered shipwrecks, including remains of "Ghost Fleet" ships built during World War I, sites related to the region's Native American cultures and maritime battlegrounds from the Revolutionary and Civil wars.