Tree ring data hold from the timbers of a nineteenth century vessel found in Argentina bespeak the ship was a whaler out of Rhode Island , last see afloat over 150 year ago . The remains — exposed at low tide on a beach near Puerto Madryn , a urban center about 700 international nautical mile south of Buenos Aires — seem to be that of the Dolphin , fit in to enquiry newlypublishedin Dendrochronologia .
“ I can not say with a hundred percent foregone conclusion , but analysis of the Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree ring indicates it is very potential that this is the ship , ” said Ignacio Mundo , the survey ’s lead author and a dendrochronologist at IANIGLA - CONICET , an Argentine science lab , in a Columbia University Earth Instituterelease .
The ship was first discovered on shores of Puerto Madryn in 2004 , and several years later the remains — the plain remnants of the ship ’s rib and some of its hull — were first unearth . venture that the ship was the Dolphin has been circulating fora decade , but the recent team thinks the tree doughnut data point certifies it .
The remains of the ship thought to be the Dolphin, on a beach near Puerto Madryn, Argentina.
Tree ring are an incredibly utile tool for dating events , fromvolcanic eruptionstocolonialism in North America . They encode climatological trend like droughts , and of course tell time , since a tree grows a doughnut for every year it ’s lived .
A couple of wood sample were taken ( a blue-blooded room of saying they were take by a chainsaw ) from the wreck and cross - reference with theNorth American Drought Atlas . The atlas contain Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree mob samples from about 30,000 tree date back over 2,000 years .
The comparison confirmed that the wreck ’s rib were made of white oak tree and its hull and wooden nails were made of yellow pine and black locust , severally . All three type of Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree grow in the easterly United States . Dating of the woodwind instrument indicate that some of the trees first started growing in 1679 , and the latest oak tree were trim back in 1849 , a twelvemonth before the Dolphin ’s grammatical construction begin .
“ The archaeologists are more cautious — they prefer a slightly higher criterion , and I do n’t blame them , ” said Mukund Rao , a dendrochronologist at Columbia University ’s Lamont - Doherty Tree Ring Lab , in the university loss . “ It ’s true we do n’t have something like the ship ’s bell . But for me , the storey is there in the tree diagram rings . ”
The detail seem to line up , but there is no smoking gun for the shipwreck ’s identity . It was a different tale for the discovery this yr of thewrecked ship that post the Shackleton expedition . In that case , the name Endurance is still clearly emblazoned on the stern , more than a century after the vessel sank to the bottom of the Weddell Sea .
art history
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