Researchers Finally Uncover History Behind Shipwreck Found At Ground Zero Of New York’s World Trade Center

In 2010, while the site that once housed the Twin Towers was being evacuated, to pave way for a 9-11 memorial, excavators made a surprising discovery – remains of a ship!

It was a July afternoon in 2010 when a particular piece of curved timber caught the light. The earth movers called the attention of the archaeologists to this piece, and they began careful earth removal to unveil still-hidden parts of the object. 

The archaeologists were able to evacuate the remains of the ship and moved them to the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory of Columbia University. Further research revealed that the discovered ship is from 18th Century pre-colonial Philadelphia. 

Before you start wondering how possible it is to determine the age and source of a log of wood. Well, it is quite possible through a process called “dendroprovenancing.” This process involves analyzing rings of the tree trunk and comparing them to reference rings from a historical catalog.

Besides using this knowledge to understand how the climate in a particular area changes over time, scientists also use it to determine the date of wooden artifacts. All they have to do is compare it to the sequences of other sample tree rings.

They were able to get perfect matches from 18th-century white oaks from eastern Pennsylvania. Indeed, the researchers believe the wood used in constructing the Pennsylvania Independence Hall in 1776 and the Ground Zero ship is from the same time and locality.

Also, some types of wood are more suitable for specific parts than others. For example, even though pine isn’t as rot-resistant as we’d like, it’s lightweight and easily worked. So, it’s typically used for planking.

However, fast forward to 2010, and the remains of the ship were found 6.7m below the ground. It is quite an unlikely find, which probably indicates that present-day Lower Manhattan was reclaimed from the sea.

In his words, “If ships [in the Philadelphia area] were easy to make or build because of the abundance of timber [in the late 1700s], then perhaps there wasn’t a lot of time put into building a strong vessel.” He also speculates that shipworm infestation was another factor that contributed to its unimpressive lifespan.

“You can make an educated leap of faith that the timber was used as soon as it was cut down and that there wasn’t any seasoning involved,” he said. Seasoning of wood helps to reduce its tendency to break or snap. Could this be another reason why it didn’t last long in operation?

However, the researchers also suggested that the buried ship could have been left at the shore during the landfilling effort in Lower Manhattan. For such projects, all available wooden structures must have been used as wedges and dykes.

Several benefits could be gleaned from these seemingly useless chunks of wood that have spent about 200 years buried underground.

Ship preservation processes typically involve treating the wood with a good amount of preservative fluids to stop the wood from disintegrating or shrinking when exposed to air.

For example, researchers are certain that information about the trend of climate change and forest ecology can be deduced from wood.

The data has proven relevant for telling the history of Ground Zero and Lower Manhattan. But it doesn’t stop there. There are several research potentials for the data from the World Trade Center vessel, now and in the future.