8/2/18 Report - $47,000 Kennedy Half. Shipwrecks and Climate Change. Metal Detecting Strategy.

Written by the TreasureGuide for the exclusive use of treasurebeachesreport.blogspot.com.

1964 Kennedy Half Dollar.

The coin shown is in exceptional condition for a dug coin.  The melt value is about $5.50, but being in at least fine condition would probably be worth over $7.00.

Last year a 1964 Kennedy half sold for $47,000 at auction.  It was a rare special mint set (SMS) coin.  Only 12 are known and their origin is a mystery.  It isn't an error coin or variety and is not easy to identify.

The 1964 SMS Kennedy half dollar has a satin-textured surface.  Salmon-orange rim toning kisses the upper obverse and lower reverse surfaces of the coin with ambient white-gray coloration across the fields and devices. Surface marks on the lower obverse that mimic dark fingerprints are described by Heritage as “carbon-gray flecks.”

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Shipwrecks aren’t necessarily barren, static things, vanished and abandoned to the deep water and the recesses of someone’s foggy memory. They may be moldering, but, like the Vamar, they’re often active places—part cultural heritage site, part dynamic ecosystem. They’re constantly in flux, and they’ll be impacted as climate change affects the water that holds them.

For years archaeologists have mainly been concerned with what climate change might do to places where the land meets the water. They’ve examined ways to stave off rising tides by buffering sites that will be swamped, hauling things to higher ground or documenting whatever they can in the water’s path. For these sites that are not yet damp, water is a threat—sometimes a distant one, sometimes one that’s gaining ground—but for the wrecks, it’s a foregone conclusion. That ship has sailed—and sunk.

With climate change, “sea-level rise is the most obvious thing people are used to hearing about, and the most easily dismissed with submerged sites,” says Jeneva Wright, an underwater archaeologist and research fellow at East Carolina University. Sea-level rise is far from the only climate-related threat facing submerged sites, though: Wright outlined a handful of others in a 2016 paper in the Journal of Maritime Archaeology written when she was working as an archaeologist in the National Parks Services’ Submerged Resources Center.

Across the field, there’s admittedly little data about some of these risks, and Wright says that archaeologists would do well to collaborate with biologists, ecologists, oceanographers, and other scientists who have amassed much more information about what a changing climate will do to parts of these ecosystems. For now, Wright describes her reading of these risks as “theoretical, hypothetical, and logical,” meaning that though there’s fairly limited research within archaeology, these forecasts square with projections that researchers in other fields have arrived at, after starting to scrutinize the future effects of climate change on, for instance, ocean chemistry, reefs, and other marine life....

I added the underlining.


Here is the link for the rest of the article.

https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/how-climate-change-will-affect-shipwrecks

Thanks to TekLord Doug for the link.

Shipwrecks are definitely not static things, but some shipwrecks are definitely more vulnerable than others.  There is little data on this stuff, and the hysteria is not based upon anything scientific.

Nothing has failed like the Critical Thinking Movement in education.

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Wen you get a signal it might be trash or treasure.  You might try to distinguish between the two by using a meter or different tones, but it is never a perfect process.  Mistakes can be made.  You never know when you make a mistake and leave something good in the ground.

The table is simplified.  There are also times when signals might be due to ground mineralization or electrical interference or other things when there is no metal item to dig.  Different targets also have different values.

What this table makes clear is two types of mistakes and two ways that you can be correct.  You can correctly identify treasure or trash and you can be mistaken about each.  When you decrease the probability of one type of mistake, you can increase the probability of another type of mistake.

For example, when you only dig very good signals, you miss more good targets along with the trash you eliminate.  What you should consider is when you decide to dig less trash, does the gain in saved time and effort make the loss in some good targets acceptable.  That is a very difficult evaluation because you never find out the value of what you left in the ground.

Many people just can't tolerate digging trash.  That is something they "feel" every time they do it.  If they similarly experienced the disappointment of treasures left in the ground, they might feel very differently about how much trash they are willing to dig.

I also know that some people think they don't miss any good targets.  And they'll never know any differently.

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No storms to watch and no big change in beach conditions.

Happy hunting,
TreasureGuide@comcast.net