It sounds like the easiest way in the world to get rich – you dig a hole in the ground and uncover buried treasure. The treasure might be ancient golden artifacts, a pirate’s cache of silver coins or diamonds hidden by a smuggler.

It turns out that treasure hunting is usually not so easy. It can take years of planning and an incredible amount of work to find a treasure. Many of the most famous finds involve detailed detective work. And today’s archeologists are using some amazing technology in the process. From sonar to radar to robots, technology can really help. And the payoff can be huge.

Today let’s become archeologists. You can find out first hand how an archeologist gets the job done.

Finding a Treasure at Sea
Imagine that you've been reading in the library. You find an old book that tells the story of a shipwreck in the 1700s. The boat is named the Nostra, and it sank in a huge and violent storm on its way from South America to Europe. But here’s the most interesting part -- when it sank, it carried two dozen barrels filled with gold coins and gold bars. The estimated value of this sunken treasure is an amazing $100 million. You do some more research. You find that the wreck of the Nostra has never been found. Since gold doesn't rust or corrode, it must be sitting on the bottom of the ocean somewhere in the Atlantic.

The Atlantic Ocean is a big place. Its size is almost unimaginable. It's approximately 3,000 miles from Europe to America, and about the same distance from Africa to South America. It’s more than 10,000 miles from the Southern tip of South America up to Greenland. And much of the Atlantic Ocean is more than a mile deep, making it hard to explore. For you to have any hope of finding the Nostra, you are going to have to narrow down the location.

Image © Maksim Shmeljov/Shutterstock

The way you start narrowing things down is to look for clues. For example, survivors of the wreck might have written letters describing where the boat sank. Or, the boat might have followed a standard course between Europe and South America, giving you a corridor to investigate. Perhaps there were other ships nearby when the Nostra sank, and the captain on one of those ships wrote down an approximate location. Navigational tools in the 1700s were crude compared to today, so you will never be able to pinpoint things exactly. But with the right information you can really narrow things down. Finding clues like this is the detective work.

Now it is time to bring in the technology. When searching the ocean, sonar is incredibly helpful. With modern sonar systems, it is possible to photograph the ocean floor with amazing clarity. A sonar system sends out sound waves into the water. The sound waves reflect off the ocean floor, and the time it takes for the reflection tells how far away it is.

By looking at the sonar photograph, an archeologist can find anomalies – places on the ocean floor that look different than they should. Then it is time to send down a robotic submarine to look at each anomaly. The robot has cameras and an arm, and the archaeologist controls the robot from aboard a ship at the ocean’s surface. The hope is that one of the anomalies comes from a part of the Nostra. Once you find one part, you can then start to scope out the debris field from the wreck. And then, with luck, you find the gold you are looking for.