Welcome to the golden age of shipwreck discoveries. Hardly a month goes by these days without news that a long-sunken vessel has turned up somewhere, from the fabled Endurance, explorer Ernest Shackleton’s ship that sank in the Antarctic in 1915, to the Ironton, a barge that foundered in Lake Huron in 1894 while carrying 1,000 tons of grain. Experts point to a variety of possible reasons that these discoveries have become more common: Technology has made it easier and less expensive to scan the ocean floor, climate change has produced more storms that churn up sunken vessels, and more people are surveying the ocean for research or to find lost loot. Plus the field of underwater archaeology has expanded significantly, and more archaeologists are excavating sunken ships for their historical value. James P. Delgado, an underwater archaeologist based in Washington, D.C., says the “period of deep-sea and ocean exploration in general is truly beginning.”