The remains of La Belle, a ship which sank in 1686, are set to be freeze dried in a massive dryer at Texas A&M university in a revolutionary new procedure.

Texas A&M University researchers working to restore the hull of La Belle, a light frigate recovered from its underwater grave, are using an unconventional method to preserve the pieces: a state-of-the-art freeze dryer big enough to hold a few head of cattle.

La Belle was carrying 43 people when it sank in Matagorda Bay in January 1686. The ship’s remains now lie in a vat of oily preservative on Texas A&M’s Riverside Campus, the former Bryan Air Force Base that serves as headquarters for research and related activities, including a division of the Center for Maritime Archaeology and Conservation.

The massive freeze dryer, at 40 feet long with an 8-foot internal diameter, is the largest such machine for conservation use in the hemisphere, says Peter Fix, the maritime center’s assistant director and project conservator for the La Belle.

The instrument arrived Monday, and Fix plans to test some smaller pieces of other objects before dismantling the carefully tended timbers of La Belle and placing them in the cavernous cavity.

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The famous Magna Carta, which has been lying in a sealed box containing helium, will soon be moved to a new box filled with Argon.

The very first Magna Carta dates to 1215, when English barons forced King John to write down the traditional rights and liberties of the country’s free persons. A copy of the Magna Carta signed by King Edward I in 1297 currently resides within a helium-filled casement at the National Archives Building in Washington. But the medieval document is scheduled for a temporary removal in 2011 so it can be re-measured for a new case filled with argon.

Researchers worried that helium atoms, which are relatively small, could escape from the case holding the Magna Carta, leaving the 713-year-old animal skin parchment susceptible to degradation. Those fears proved unfounded, but the National Archives has chosen to preserve the parchment in another inert gas, argon, whose larger atoms have proven easier to contain.

“Argon is used to displace oxygen and any moisture that may be remaining in the encasement area, to preserve the document and minimize degradation,” said Mark Luce, an engineer at the National Institute of Standards and Technology.

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Iraqi officials are arguing over whether priority should be given to preserving ancient Babylon or making money off of it.

Local officials want swift work done to restore the crumbling ruins and start building restaurants and gift shops to draw in tourists, while antiquities officials in Baghdad favor a more painstaking approach to avoid the gaudy restoration mistakes of the past.

The ruins of the millennia-old city, famed for its Hanging Gardens and the Tower of Babel, have suffered heavily over the past decades. Deep in Iraq’s verdant south, the cluster of excavated temples and palaces were mostly rebuilt by former ruler Saddam Hussein in the 1980s, using modern yellow brick to erect towering structures that marred the fragile remains of the original mud brick ruins. After Saddam’s fall in 2003, a U.S. military base on the site did further damage.

The site is filled with overgrown hillocks hiding the estimated 95 percent of the city that remains unexcavated — which archaeologists hope could eventually be uncovered.

But for that to happen, they argue, the slow and meticulous work needs to be done to train Iraqis in conservation and draw up a preservation plan that can be used to drum up international funds and get the site UNESCO World Heritage status.

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Experimental work has begun to preserve artifacts from the Queen Anne’s Revenge while they are still on the ocean floor.

Staff from the N.C. Underwater Archaeology Branch conducted a three-day expedition at the QAR site this week and focused on a new “in situ” method of conservation that begins the process while artifacts are still on the ocean’s bottom.

Skinny aluminum rods called sacrificial anodes were attached to several anchors and a cannon to change the electrochemical process that corrodes iron in saltwater, reducing or even reversing the amount of salts absorbed by the iron objects, said QAR Project Director Mark Wilde Ramsing.

He said they’ve tested the process and it seems to be working. And by beginning conservation under water, they can potentially save time and space at the conservation lab.

In the lab, it can take up to five years to remove salts from a large cannon using electrolysis.

“Hopefully this will reduce the time by several years,” Wilde Ramsing said. “It’s a fairly experimental and if nothing else, it will help to stop the artifacts from continuing to corrode.”

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Creative COW has posted a fascinating article on how the Library of Congress is working to preserve film for thousands of years into the future.

But copying old films to new stocks is not as simple as it sounds. There are many factors that can impact your ability to be able to do that very well, especially with nitrate archival films. Shrinkage is the most notable. Original era nitrate negatives were showing significant shrinkage shortly after they were shot and processed. After it was developed, the film had to be dried again, so that it didn’t stick to itself, and one of the plasticizers used to keep the film flexible was quite volatile, and could shrink considerably. In some cases, you can actually see the perforation from the original negative printed onto the original positive.

Other challenges come from running a fairly soft material — the nitrate film — through pieces of steel, the projectors, and the sprockets. If things weren’t running quite perfectly, bases and emulsions got scratched. Static electricity attracted dirt to the surface, where it could be embedded in the emulsion.

All of these problems can show up on new prints, so we have various pieces of equipment designed to help us overcome those.

The introduction of wet gate printers, or immersion printers, was the sea change in the world of preservation. They allowed laboratories to make fairly pristine copies from films that were otherwise horribly scratched, by immersing the film in a liquid — perchloroethylene, the same fluid used in dry cleaning — to fill in the scratches.

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