Underwater expedition unveils new photos of World War II destroyer sunk in pivotal battle
According to the USS Laffey Association, the ship went down on Nov. 13, 1942, during the Naval Battle of Guadalcanal and currently rests upright about half a mile beneath the surface in a region known as the Iron Bottom Sound — a graveyard for dozens of ships and hundreds of planes lost during the six-year-long global conflict.
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The latest mission, expedition NA173, was conducted by the nonprofit Ocean Exploration Trust and supported by NOAA.
Over a stretch of 21 days, researchers used a remotely operated vehicle and sophisticated imaging technology to survey the wreckage and other historic sites.
Photos released by the team show the Laffey still sitting upright on the seafloor with much of her bow and midsection intact despite more than 80 years underwater.
Among the discoveries was a plaque that is still legible, showing the ship's name and builder information despite decades of exposure on the bottom of the Pacific.
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The ship's wreckage was originally discovered in 1992 during a National Geographic Society expedition led by renowned oceanographer Dr. Robert Ballard, who is most famous for locating the Titanic in 1985.
5 Maritime experts on an expedition around the Solomon Islands in the South Pacific recently explored the wreckage of the USS Laffey.
Ocean Exploration Trust
5 Photos released by the team show the Laffey still sitting upright on the seafloor with much of her bow and midsection intact despite more than 80 years underwater.
Ocean Exploration Trust
5 Among the discoveries was a plaque that is still legible, showing the ship's name and builder information despite decades of exposure on the bottom of the Pacific.
Ocean Exploration Trust
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Since that initial discovery, the Laffey has been explored less than a handful of times, making this latest adventure a unique opportunity to document the wreckage's condition.
According to the USS Laffey Association, a torpedo led to the ship's demise after sailors engaged several Japanese battleships in a ferocious battle.
Historical records indicate that 59 sailors were killed or lost during the attack on the ship, with more than 100 wounded.
5 The ship's wreckage was originally discovered in 1992 during a National Geographic Society expedition led by renowned oceanographer Dr. Robert Ballard.
Ocean Exploration Trust
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5 According to the USS Laffey Association, the ship went down on Nov. 13, 1942, during the Naval Battle of Guadalcanal and currently rests upright about half a mile beneath the surface in a region known as the Iron Bottom Sound.
Naval History and Heritage Command
Historians say during the broader conflict, located more than 1,000 miles northeast of Australia, some 20,000 lives were claimed from both the Axis and Allied powers.
Researchers believe at least 111 ships and 1,450 planes were lost in the region during the war, but only a small fraction of these wrecks have been thoroughly explored or documented.
During the three-week-long exploratory mission, experts also investigated the wrecks of Australia's HMAS Canberra — the largest warship ever lost in battle by the Royal Australian Navy — and several other sites belonging to the U.S. and Japan.
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Buzz Feed
11 hours ago
- Buzz Feed
21 Body Horror Wikipedia Pages
Obsessed with the macabre?! Subscribe to the That Got Dark newsletter to get your weekly dopamine fix of the macabre delivered RIGHT to your inbox! Fatal Familial Insomnia — An extremely rare genetic neurological disorder that causes progressive insomnia, leading to total sleep deprivation and death. At the most basic level, FFI affects the part of the brain that controls sleep. People with this rare disorder slowly lose the ability to sleep, and this leads to serious problems like confusion, trouble moving, body changes (like sweating a lot or having a fast heartbeat), and eventually death — usually within a year or two. Currently, there is no cure or treatment. Doctors can test for the gene, but they can only treat the symptoms to keep the person as comfortable as possible. Guatemala Syphilis Experiments — Unethical medical studies conducted by the US government in the 1940s, where researchers intentionally infected prisoners, soldiers, and mental patients in Guatemala with syphilis and gonorrhea without consent. Without the people's knowledge or permission, researchers deliberately infected hundreds of Guatemalan prisoners, soldiers, sex workers, children, and even mental hospital patients with syphilis and other sexually transmitted diseases to test if antibiotics like penicillin could prevent or treat them. Many of the people were never treated, and some suffered serious health problems or died. These experiments were kept secret for decades and only became public in 2010, when the U.S. government formally apologized for the abuse and wrongdoing. Unit 731 — Japan's WWII biological and chemical warfare research unit that conducted live human experiments. Unit 731 was a covert biological and chemical warfare unit of the Imperial Japanese Army during World War II, based in occupied Manchuria (present-day China). Operating under the guise of epidemic prevention, it conducted brutal human experiments on civilians and prisoners of war, including vivisection, forced infection with deadly diseases, and frostbite testing. These experiments led to the deaths of an estimated 300,000-plus people. After the war, the U.S. granted immunity to many Unit 731 members in exchange for their research data, allowing key figures like Ishii to avoid prosecution. The unit's atrocities remain one of the most horrifying examples of wartime human experimentation. The Monster Study — A 1939 unethical speech experiment that was conducted on orphaned children in Iowa. Some were psychologically abused to induce speech problems. Led by a researcher named Wendell Johnson, this controversial experiment set out to find out if telling kids they had a speech problem could actually make them stutter. They worked with 22 children from an orphanage — some who already stuttered and some who didn't. The researchers told some of the kids with normal speech that they spoke badly and needed to be careful, even though that wasn't true. As a result, some of those kids became shy, nervous, and had trouble speaking, even though they hadn't stuttered before. The experiment caused lasting emotional harm, and it was later called the 'Monster Study' because of how unethical it was. In 2007, a lawsuit filed by former test subjects and estate representatives of those who have since died was settled for $925,000. Radium Girls — A group of young women in the 1910s and 1920s who worked in factories painting watch dials with glowing paint that contained radium, a radioactive element, ultimately leading to their horrifying deaths from radiation. The young women were told the paint was safe and were even encouraged to lick their brushes to get a fine point. Over time, many of them became very sick — losing teeth, suffering from broken bones, and developing terrible jaw problems — because the radium was poisoning them from the inside. When the companies refused to take responsibility, some of the women fought back by taking them to court, winning a settlement in 1928. FOP (Fibrodysplasia Ossificans Progressiva) — An extremely rare condition where a person's soft tissues — like muscles, tendons, and ligaments — slowly turn into bone over time, essentially turning people into 'living statues.' Because of this condition, parts of the body that are supposed to move and bend can become locked in place by extra bone growing where it shouldn't. Even small injuries, like bumps, can trigger this bone growth. As FOP gets worse, it can become very hard to move, eat, or even breathe because of extra bone forming around the rib cage, restricting expansion of the lungs. There's no known cure yet, and doctors try to help by avoiding anything that might cause flare-ups and by managing symptoms as best they can. Tuskegee Syphilis Study — A racist and unethical 40-year medical experiment carried out by the U.S. government where Black men with syphilis were deliberately left untreated. From 1932 to 1972, the Tuskegee Syphilis Study involved hundreds of poor Black men in Alabama who had syphilis but were never told they had the disease. Instead of treating them, doctors studied how the illness would progress if left untreated — even after penicillin became the standard cure in the 1940s. The men were misled and denied proper care for decades, which caused serious harm and death. The study only ended after a news report exposed it, leading to public outrage and a formal government apology in 1997. Teratoma — A type of tumor that commonly contains teeth, hair, fat, or muscle. They can even contain a liver, lungs, eyes, or even a brain, though it's not as typical. Teratomas are sometimes mistaken for parasitic twins. This type of tumor happens when certain cells that are supposed to develop into any part of the body grow in a confused or mixed-up way. Teratomas can be found in places like the ovaries, testicles, or even the chest or brain. Most are harmless and can be removed with surgery, but some can be cancerous and need more serious treatment. Even though they can sound strange or scary, many teratomas are treatable, especially when found early. MKUltra — A highly secretive human CIA experimentation program that tested mind control techniques, often without subjects' consent. MKUltra began in 1953 and ran through the 1960s. The program consisted of a series of projects that experimented with mind control techniques — often without people's knowledge or consent. They tested drugs like LSD, hypnosis, and other methods on prisoners, hospital patients, and even regular citizens, hoping to learn how to control thoughts or extract secrets. Many people were harmed, and some were permanently affected or died. The project was kept hidden until the 1970s, when it was exposed by journalists and government investigations. Body Integrity Dysphoria — A rare condition where a person feels like a part of their own body — such as a leg, arm, or even their vision or hearing — doesn't belong to them, sometimes giving them a desire to amputate healthy body parts. Even though the body part is healthy, the person might feel very distressed and strongly believe that they would feel better or 'whole' if it were removed or disabled. This condition is not well understood, and it can be very upsetting for those who experience it. Treatment is challenging, and doctors usually try to help through therapy and support, rather than surgery, since the condition is more about how the brain sees the body rather than something physically wrong. Exploding Head Syndrome — A harmless but startling condition where a person hears a sudden loud noise — like a bang, crash, or explosion — just as they're falling asleep or waking up. Even though it sounds real, there's no actual sound and nothing is physically happening when people experience this. It doesn't cause pain, but it can be scary and confusing. Some people also see flashes of light or feel a jolt in their body. Experts aren't sure exactly what causes it, but it may be related to how the brain shuts down for sleep. Lobotomy — A once-popular psychosurgery technique involving destruction of the brain's frontal lobe, often resulting in severe personality changes. Though it's since been discredited, at the time, this brain surgery was used to treat severe mental illnesses like schizophrenia and depression. It involved cutting connections in the brain's frontal lobes to reduce symptoms, but often caused serious side effects such as personality changes, cognitive impairment, and emotional dullness. Popularized in the 1930s through to the 1950s — especially by neurologist Walter Freeman's 'ice-pick' method — it was eventually abandoned due to its harmful effects and the rise of psychiatric medications. Resignation Syndrome — A rare and mysterious condition where children, usually refugees, fall into a coma-like state after experiencing extreme stress or trauma — often related to uncertainty about asylum or fear of deportation. Children with this condition will stop talking, eating, walking, and responding to the world around them, as if they've completely shut down. It has mostly been seen in Sweden among children from war-torn countries. Recovery can take months or even years, and often begins once the family's asylum situation becomes more secure. Necrotizing Fasciitis — Also known as 'flesh-eating bacteria,' is a rare but very serious bacterial infection spreads rapidly and is often fatal. Necrotizing fasciitis spreads quickly and destroys the body's soft tissue, especially under the skin. It's sometimes called a "flesh-eating disease," though the bacteria don't actually "eat" flesh — they release toxins that kill tissue. 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This amoeba can enter the body when water goes up the nose — usually during swimming or diving — and then travels to the brain, causing a severe and often fatal infection called primary amebic meningoencephalitis (PAM). Symptoms start with headache, fever, and nausea, and quickly progress to confusion, seizures, and coma. It's almost always fatal, but very rare, and you can't get it from drinking water — only from water entering the nose. The Thalidomide Scandal — A major medical disaster in the late 1950s and early 1960s, where a drug called thalidomide was given to pregnant women to treat morning sickness and help with sleep, but actually caused birth defects. At the time, the drug was thought to be safe, but it caused severe birth defects in thousands of babies across the world. Many were born with shortened or missing arms and legs, and some had problems with their ears, eyes, or internal organs. It took five years for the connection between the drug and the birth defects to be made. The tragedy led to stricter drug testing and approval rules in many countries, especially during pregnancy. Randy Gardner sleep deprivation experiment — Randy Gardner was a high school student who, in 1964, stayed awake for 11 days straight (264 hours) as part of a science fair experiment — the longest scientifically recorded period of sleep deprivation. During the experiment, he experienced mood swings, memory problems, trouble concentrating, and even hallucinations, but surprisingly had no long-term health effects. Researchers used the experiment to learn more about how important sleep is for the brain and body. Afterward, Randy recovered by sleeping for about 14 hours and then returning to a more normal sleep pattern. 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While the idea was exciting, the experiment faced major problems: oxygen levels dropped significantly, food became scarce, and people argued, making it hard to live and work. Obsessed with this kind of content? Subscribe to the That Got Dark newsletter to get a weekly post just like this delivered directly to your inbox. It's a scary good time you won't want to miss.
National Geographic
6 days ago
- National Geographic
A century ago, there was a race to make the first color photos. Now there's a race to save them.
The revolutionary invention of autochromes changed photography. As those pictures decay, they're revealing a new kind of beauty. First digitized in 2008 (left), this 1937 photo of a dance performance in Mississippi was created using Dufaycolor, an early color-film product. By 2023, it had been transformed by a form of chemical deterioration known as vinegar syndrome. Photograph by J. Baylor Roberts, National Geographic Image Collection In the early 1980s, the late National Geographic Society photographer turned archivist Volkmar Wentzel was delving through storage when he stumbled onto something both breathtaking and heartbreaking: a box of delicate glass panels, most of them the size of postcards, displaying color images captured in the early 20th century. Many were deteriorating, their once crisp scenes speckled with ghostly snowflakes, obscured by halos, and otherwise rendered surreal by time and neglect. They were autochromes, the products of a turn-of-the-20th-century race to capture the world in all its color. And now the race was on to preserve them, even as time transformed them in extraordinary ways. Introduced in 1907 by French inventors Auguste and Louis Lumière, autochrome technology was revolutionary in its day, relying on a light-sensitive silver emulsion covered with a fine layer of potato starch. That powdery extract—then popular as thickener, adhesive, and fabric stiffener—was crucial to capturing the chroma of the era. Microscopic particles dyed green, orange, and violet were scattered across a plate and sealed on with varnish. When light struck the plate through a camera's open shutter, each colored granule blocked a range of wavelengths corresponding to colors of the visible spectrum, exposing the emulsion beneath to countless tiny dots of variously filtered light. Some autochromes—early 20th-century color photos on glass plates—now have freckles from oxidizing silver particles, as in this undated, unidentified landscape. Unknown Photographer, National Geographic Image Collection After a few chemical baths in a darkroom, the transparency that appeared on glass was, seen up close, a pointillistic mosaic. But pull back and shine light through the plate—covered with another glass layer, for protection—and a vivid, painterly image emerged. National Geographic magazine's first full-time editor was an autochrome champion, commissioning and procuring glass plate works from photographers around the world. Because exposure times were long, much of early color photography consists of still lifes and landscapes, but National Geographic acquired dynamic images of life as it's lived: of crowded bazaars in Albania, of masked dancers in Tibet, of riders atop brightly garbed elephants in India. Autochromes, together with similar processes involving glass plates, remained the primary means of making color photos until the 1935 debut of Kodachrome film, with its layers of emulsion that were themselves photosensitive. In the film era, the Society's glass plates were not carefully preserved. Wentzel, during more than 40 years as a National Geographic field photographer, saw value in the old photos while many of his peers were focused on innovation. When the Society thinned its collection in the 1960s, he rescued plates from the trash, taking them home for safekeeping and eventual return to the archive. Others simply moldered, forgotten, until Wentzel rediscovered them in off-site storage upon becoming the Society's first official photo archivist, in 1980. A Syrian desert patrol on camelback visits the ruins of Palmyra in a 1938 Dufaycolor. This version was scanned in 2012, before its acetate film began visibly degrading. Photograph by W. Robert Moore, National Geographic Image Collection In the past 13 years, the telltale blotch of vinegar syndrome has set in. 'Dufays' and autochromes are kept in cold storage today, which slows but doesn't halt such deterioration. Photograph by W. Robert Moore, National Geographic Image Collection Wentzel made it a mission to preserve, catalog, and exhibit the old photos, and today National Geographic's Early Color Photography Collection comprises some 13,000 plates, including one of the world's largest assemblages of autochromes (the largest is at the Musée Albert-Kahn, outside Paris). But as with many remaining early color photos, National Geographic's have been altered by light, heat, humidity, and improper handling. Plates have cracked and fissured. Oxidizing silver particles have created radiant, amoeba-shaped orange blotches. On the autochrome descendants known as Dufaycolors, violet bruises are evidence of 'vinegar syndrome,' a chemical decay affecting layers of film between glass. Named for its telltale scent and contagious from plate to plate, vinegar syndrome is 'a plague amongst photographic archives,' says Sara Manco, director of the National Geographic Society's photo and illustration archives. Degrading always sounds bad, but they're also developing, from documentary objects into a weird science-history project. Rebecca Dupont , National Geographic image archivist It all sounds rather tragic, but the blemishes also have given many of the plates a strange new beauty. No longer pristine documents of history, they've become testaments to the ravages of time: abstracted, fragmented, and obscured, like so many ancient and admired artifacts. What's more, says image archivist Rebecca Dupont, witnessing the deterioration—a process that will only ever play out once—offers lessons about the science behind these objects. 'If you think about it, photography is still a relatively new medium, only 150 years old,' Dupont says. And the objects in the collection 'haven't yet reached the end of their lives. They're in a special stage right now where we get to see what happens to them.' (These 18 autochrome photos will transport you to another era.) Exposure to humidity caused this Dufaycolor to fade and its film base to shrivel. As National Geographic archivist Sara Manco says, 'We'll never know what that image was like.' Photograph by Rudolf Balogh, National Geographic Image Collection Even as the plates continue to deteriorate, some measure of permanence has been achieved. With a 2020 grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities, Manco and a team of archivists spent three years digitizing the entire collection. These days, the originals are carefully organized in temperature-controlled storage. Those afflicted with vinegar syndrome are sequestered, and many broken ones have been painstakingly pieced together. Despite all that care, the archivists know they can't preserve the plates forever—and they're OK with that. 'Degrading always sounds bad, but they're also developing, from documentary objects into a weird science-history project,' Dupont says. 'Are the images we're looking at being lost? Or are they just being changed into something new?' A version of this story appears in the August 2025 issue of National Geographic magazine.
Yahoo
19-07-2025
- Yahoo
Underwater expedition unveils new imagery of sunken World War II destroyer
HONIARA, Solomon Islands - Maritime experts on an expedition around the Solomon Islands in the South Pacific recently explored the wreckage of the USS Laffey, a destroyer sunk during a pivotal series of battles in World War II. According to the USS Laffey Association, the ship went down on Nov. 13, 1942, during the Naval Battle of Guadalcanal and currently rests upright about half a mile beneath the surface in a region known as the Iron Bottom Sound — a graveyard for dozens of ships and hundreds of planes lost during the six-year-long global conflict. The latest mission, expedition NA173, was conducted by the nonprofit Ocean Exploration Trust and supported by NOAA. Over a stretch of 21 days, researchers used a remotely operated vehicle and sophisticated imaging technology to survey the wreckage and other historic sites. War Trophy From George Washington's Army Discovered Amid British Shipwreck Photos released by the team show the Laffey still sitting upright on the seafloor with much of her bow and midsection intact despite more than 80 years underwater. Among the discoveries was a plaque that is still legible, showing the ship's name and builder information despite decades of exposure on the bottom of the Pacific. The ship's wreckage was originally discovered in 1992 during a National Geographic Society expedition led by renowned oceanographer Dr. Robert Ballard, who is most famous for locating the Titanic in 1985. Since that initial discovery, the Laffey has been explored less than a handful of times, making this latest adventure a unique opportunity to document the wreckage's condition. According to the USS Laffey Association, a torpedo led to the ship's demise after sailors engaged several Japanese battleships in a ferocious battle. Historical records indicate that 59 sailors were killed or lost during the attack on the ship, with more than 100 wounded. Noaa Mission Finds Unexpected Discovery At Site Of Sunken Uss Yorktown Historians say during the broader conflict, located more than 1,000 miles northeast of Australia, some 20,000 lives were claimed from both the Axis and Allied powers. Researchers believe at least 111 ships and 1,450 planes were lost in the region during the war, but only a small fraction of these wrecks have been thoroughly explored or documented. During the three-week-long exploratory mission, experts also investigated the wrecks of Australia's HMAS Canberra - the largest warship ever lost in battle by the Royal Australian Navy - and several other sites belonging to the U.S. and article source: Underwater expedition unveils new imagery of sunken World War II destroyer
