On this day in 1973, researchers from the Duke University Marine Lab made a stunning discovery some 240 feet below the Atlantic Ocean off the North Carolina coast.
A team led by John Newton, marine superintendent for Duke’s oceanographic program, was conducting a two-week sonar survey in the waters off Cape Hatteras when they found the upside-down wreck of the legendary USS Monitor, the Union Navy’s first ironclad warship during the American Civil War.
It sunk in 1862 and its exact resting place had been unknown for more than a century.
In 1975 the site became our nation’s first national marine sanctuary.
