The Submerged Resources Center is a unit within the

United States The United States of America (U.S.A. or USA), commonly known as the United States (U.S. or US) or America, is a country primarily located in North America. It consists of 50 states, a federal district, five major unincorporated territo ...

National Park Service The National Park Service (NPS) is an agency of the United States federal government within the U.S. Department of the Interior that manages all national parks, most national monuments, and other natural, historical, and recreational propertie ...

. The unit is based out of

Lakewood, Colorado The City of Lakewood is the home rule municipality that is the most populous municipality in Jefferson County, Colorado, United States. The city population was 155,984 at the 2020 U.S. Census making Lakewood the fifth most populous city in Col ...

in the NPS Intermountain Region headquarters.

History

In 1976, the Submerged Cultural Resources Unit (known as SCRU) was formed and staffed by underwater

archeologist Archaeology or archeology is the scientific study of human activity through the recovery and analysis of material culture. The archaeological record consists of artifacts, architecture, biofacts or ecofacts, sites, and cultural landscapes ...

photographers A photographer (the Greek φῶς (''phos''), meaning "light", and γραφή (''graphê''), meaning "drawing, writing", together meaning "drawing with light") is a person who makes photographs. Duties and types of photographers As in other ...

, and service divers to provide the expertise required by managers of national parks with submerged lands. Renamed the Submerged Resources Center in 1999 to include natural resources, the core mission of the program has remained the same: to inventory and evaluate submerged resources in the National Park System and to assist other agencies, nationally and internationally, with underwater resource issues.

Projects

Projects the SRC have been involved in include work on USS Arizona, the shipwrecks of

Isle Royale National Park Isle Royale National Park is an American national park consisting of Isle Royale – known as Minong to the native Ojibwe – along with more than 400 small adjacent islands and the surrounding waters of Lake Superior, in the state of Michigan. ...

, and mapping the shipwrecks of

Dry Tortugas National Park Dry Tortugas National Park is a national park located about west of Key West in the Gulf of Mexico. The park preserves Fort Jefferson and the seven Dry Tortugas islands, the westernmost and most isolated of the Florida Keys. The archipelago's c ...

, among others. Daniel Lenihan, former Chief of the SRC, describes the founding of the unit and many of its exploits in ''Submerged: Adventures of America's Most Elite Underwater Archeology Team''.

References

{{Reflist National Park Service