From the RMS Titanic to the SS Endurance, shipwrecks offer valuable -- yet swiftly deteriorating -- windows into the past. Conservators slowly dry marine wooden artifacts to preserve them but doing so can inflict damage.
To better care for delicate marine artifacts, researchers have developed a new hydrogel that quickly neutralizes harmful acids and stabilized waterlogged wood from an 800-year-old shipwreck.
Wooden artifacts from shipwrecks are drenched with seawater, an environment that enables acid-producing bacteria and wood-eating fungi to thrive. To prevent damage from acid and microbes, conservators usually remove water from these artifacts by freeze-drying or using a process that replaces the water with highly pressurized carbon dioxide or a viscous polymer. However, these processes can take months and increases brittleness or warps the artifacts.
As a proof-of-concept approach, the team pasted hydrogels with varying amounts of silver onto 800-year-old pieces of wood from the Nanhai One shipwreck, which was discovered off China's south coast. They found that each gel neutralized acid up to 1 centimeter deep after 10 days, but the dissolving gels that contained less silver did so more quickly, after 1 day.
An archaeological study has determined that cowrie-shell artifacts found throughout the Mariana Islands were lures used for hunting octopuses and that the devices, similar versions of which have been ...
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