Issue Description:
Submerged cultural resources are an important part of our nation’s maritime heritage and their protection is a mandate of the National Marine Sanctuaries Act. The National Marine Sanctuary Program (NMSP) has attempted to fully characterize these resources by assembling a database of known shipwrecks along the West Coast. The NMSP needs to develop strategies to define, identify, locate, characterize, and protect the cultural resources within its boundaries – from shipwrecks to archaeological sites and artifacts. A component of the submerged cultural resources program will be to identify potential resource threats from sunken vessels (e.g. recent oil releases from the sunken freighter Jacob Luckenbach, or potential releases from the tanker Montebello).