Enlarge / Cursed Gold: A Shipwreck Scandal documents the spectacular rise and fall of treasure hunter Tommy Thompson. (credit: Recovery Limited Partnership Liquidating Trust)

Many people dream of finding lost or hidden treasure, but sometimes realizing that dream turns out to be a nightmare. Such was the case for Tommy Thompson, an American treasure hunter who famously beat the odds to discover the location of the SS Central America shipwreck in 1988. It had been dubbed the "Ship of Gold" since it sank in 1857 laden with 30,000 pounds of gold bars and coins—collectively worth enough money to have some impact on the Panic of 1857 financial crisis.

Thompson and his team recovered significant amounts of gold and artifacts to great fanfare, with experts at the time suggesting the trove could be worth as much as $400 million. The euphoria proved short-lived. Thirty-nine insurance companies filed lawsuits, claiming the gold was rightfully theirs since the companies had paid damages for the lost gold back in the mid-19th century. Thompson eventually prevailed in 1996, when courts awarded him and his discovery team 92 percent of the gold they'd recovered.

But actually realizing profits from the gold proved challenging; In the end, Thompson sold the gold for just $52 million, almost all of which went to pay off the massive debt the project had accumulated over the ensuing years. So naturally, there were more lawsuits, this time from the investors who had financed Thompson's expedition, accusing him of fraud. Thompson didn't help his case when he went on the run in 2012 with his assistant, living off some $4 million in assets stashed in an offshore account.

Enlarge / Fragment of the Antikythera mechanism, circa 205 BC, housed in the collection of the National Archaeological Museum, Athens. (credit: Fine Art Images/Heritage Images/Getty Image)

The inspiration for the titular device in last year's blockbuster, Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny, was an actual archaeological artifact: the Antikythera mechanism, a 2,200-year-old bronze mechanical computer. It doesn't have any mystical time-traveling powers, but the device has been the subject of fierce scientific scrutiny for many decades and is believed to have been used to predict eclipses and calculate the positions of the planets.

A new paper published in The Horological Journal found evidence, based on statistical techniques drawn from physics, particularly the study of gravitational waves, that the mechanism's calendar ring was designed to track the lunar calendar. This contradicts a century-long assumption among scholars of the mechanism that the calendar ring had 365 holes, thus tracking with a solar calendar, but is in keeping with the conclusions of a 2020 analysis.

“It’s a neat symmetry that we’ve adapted techniques we use to study the universe today to understand more about a mechanism that helped people keep track of the heavens nearly two millennia ago," said co-author Graham Woan, an astrophysicist at the University of Glasgow. “We hope that our findings about the Antikythera mechanism, although less supernaturally spectacular than those made by Indiana Jones, will help deepen our understanding of how this remarkable device was made and used by the Greeks.”

Enlarge / Ernest Shackleton died on board the Quest in 1922. Forty years later, the ship sank off Canada's Atlantic Coast. (credit: Tore Topp/Royal Canadian Geographical Society)

Famed polar explorer Ernest Shackleton famously defied the odds to survive the sinking of his ship, Endurance, which became trapped in sea ice in 1914. His luck ran out on his follow-up expedition; he died unexpectedly of a heart attack in 1922 on board a ship called Quest. The ship survived that expedition and sailed for another 40 years, eventually sinking in 1962 after its hull was pierced by ice on a seal-hunting run. Shipwreck hunters have now located the remains of the converted Norwegian sealer in the Labrador Sea, off the coast of Newfoundland, Canada. The wreckage of Endurance was found in pristine condition in 2022 at the bottom of the Weddell Sea.

The Quest expedition's relatively minor accomplishments might lack the nail-biting drama of the Endurance saga, but the wreck is nonetheless historically significant. "His final voyage kind of ended that Heroic Age of Exploration, of polar exploration, certainly in the south," renowned shipwreck hunter David Mearns told the BBC. "Afterwards, it was what you would call the scientific age. In the pantheon of polar ships, Quest is definitely an icon."

As previously reported, Endurance set sail from Plymouth, Massachusetts, on August 6, 1914, with Shackleton joining his crew in Buenos Aires, Argentina. By January 1915, the ship had become hopelessly locked in sea ice, unable to continue its voyage. For 10 months, the crew endured the freezing conditions, waiting for the ice to break up. The ship's structure remained intact, but by October 25, Shackleton realized Endurance was doomed. He and his men opted to camp out on the ice some two miles (3.2 km) away, taking as many supplies as they could with them.