A key piece of technology used to hunt down the Franklin Expedition shipwreck comes from the University of Manitoba.
Surveyors used LiDAR, which is similar to sonar but uses light instead of sound, to map and find pieces of a wooden deck plug from a Franklin expedition ship.
That discovery helped lead to finding the sunken ship.
Researchers borrowed the equipment from S. Brooke Milne, an anthropology professor at the University of Manitoba.
She’s been using LiDAR for U of M arctic archeology for years.
The remarkable find completes one half of a puzzle that long ago captured the Victorian imagination and gave rise to many searches throughout the 19th century for Franklin and his crew.
A search team confirmed the discovery in the early morning hours of Sunday using a remotely operated underwater vehicle recently acquired by Parks Canada. They found the wreck 11 metres below the water's surface.
It is not known yet whether the ship is HMS Erebus -- the flagship on which Franklin himself was sailing, and is believed to have died -- or HMS Terror.
- with files from The Canadian Press
