SAN FRANCISCO (AP) – Scientists have rediscovered a mostly intact World War II aircraft carrier the U.S. Navy scuttled off the Northern California coast decades ago.
The U.S.S. Independence was located and video recorded as part of a National Oceanic and Atmospheric mission to locate and map an estimated 300 historic shipwrecks in the waters outside San Francisco’s Golden Gate Bridge.
Images captured by a remotely controlled miniature submarine showed the Independence sitting upright about 30 miles west of the coast and near the Farallon Islands. A plane is visible in a hangar.
The Independence operated in the Pacific during the war and served as a target ship for two Bikini Atoll atomic bomb tests in 1946. The Navy then used the ship to study nuclear decontamination before sinking it in 1951.
