Countless ships and planes have gone down somewhere in the ocean, and finding them is not mean feat. One such vessel was the SS Central America, which sunk in 1857. It was known as the Ship of Gold, and when it went down it had 14,000 kg of gold on board. Obviously a LOT of people were quite keen to find it, but it remained undiscovered. Until, that is, a team of people decided to use something called Bayesian Search Theory, which involves making a map of probabilities using all available data. Larry Stone from Metron Scientific Solutions was involved in this search, and he explained hwo they did it to Georgia Mills.

Larry – The way we went about this search was using this Bayesian Theory. The information available was the last recorded position form Captain Herndon, who was the Captain of the ship SS Central America, who actually went down with the ship by the way, but he hollered his position across to a passing ship about 6 o’clock at night. The ship went down at 8 o’clock. There were passing ships that saw the Central America. Survivors were recovered the next morning at about 8 o’clock. We had a position for that ship that recovered them.