3D technology allows all to see Lake Superior's most notorious shipwreck
TWO HARBORS, Minn. – Lake Superior is home to more than 300 shipwrecks. Each one is a reminder of the lives lost in our efforts toward progress.
Vadnais Heights resident Stefan McDaniel is ready to head up north again to the great lake. It's where he's trying to go back in time, by going below the surface.
"Normally, when you think of like archeological artifacts such as a building from like 1850 or something like that, they're gone. They burned down, they got demolished and replaced with something else," McDaniel said. "These ships are a time capsule of that time period."
And one ship in particular keeps him, and others, coming back 116 years after it sank, and changed Minnesota's history forever.
In 1905, there was a big storm, and that storm caused havoc on the north shore," said Hayes Scriven.
It's a history Scriven works to keep alive.
"It sunk close to 29 ships, it killed 30 people, it was a massive, massive storm. And the Madiera crashed right behind us on Gold Rock here," Scriven said. "That shipwreck and that storm is the reason why Split Rock Lighthouse is here today."
At one of Minnesota's most photographed places, McDaniel is taking a new kind of picture.
"You're trying to cover all of the wreck site and get it all on video or get images of it if you're just doing still images," McDaniel said.
To try and put the broken ship back together.
"Once you've gotten all that coverage, what you do is you go back later and you use software, photogrammetry software, to assemble all these images together and create a 3D model of it," he said.
MORE: New "photogrammetry" technology could change how we learn about shipwrecks
Creating the most unique and comprehensive view of the Madeira since the ship went down. And while this dive is fun for McDaniel, the group he's a part of has been hard at work using this process. And they're almost ready to introduce the world to something they thought they'd never be able to.
"That's really what I love about history. Everybody thinks we know the past. We really don't," Scriven said. "We're really just scraping the top of this back to really, truly understanding what it was like back then."