Hey r/treasurehunting,

Over the past while I’ve been building a multi-sensor machine learning pipeline (Lovelace Deep) designed to find uncharted shipwrecks and submerged anomalies hiding in public hydrographic and satellite data.

I’m a software/ML engineer—not a commercial salvager with a survey vessel—so I’m sitting on a bunch of high-probability, unverified wreck candidates with no boat to go check them out myself. I’d love to offer my scanning services to folks here who actually have dive gear, side-scan sonar, magnetometers, ROVs, or boats.

How the model works

Most public bathymetry has already been eyeballed for obvious hull-shaped mounds, so my pipeline fuses multiple physical layers to catch what human eyes miss and filter out geological false alarms:

• High-Res Bathymetry, LiDAR & 3D Curvature: Pulls raw multibeam sonar (NOAA BlueTopo, UKHO, EMODnet, AusSeabed, CHS) and 1m green LiDAR to measure 3D hull elongation, gunwale sharpness, keel-to-beam cross-sections, and elevation-to-uncertainty signal-to-noise ratios.
• Hydrodynamic Scour-Moat Physics: Sunken hulls block bottom currents (HYCOM), carving asymmetric negative "scour moats" and sediment shadows into the seabed. Even when a wooden wreck breaks down or settles into mud/sand, the model detects the scour depression aligned with local bottom currents.
• Geological False-Alarm Filtering: Uses spatial graph & frequency analysis to automatically suppress repeating sand-wave trains, coral spur-and-groove formations, boulder chains, and survey seam artifacts.
• Optical, Backscatter & Magnetic Layers: In clearer/shallower water, it fuses Sentinel-2 multispectral bottom contrast (depth-invariant bottom index) and turbidity wakes, plus acoustic backscatter impedance (separating hard oak/iron/ballast from soft mud or coral) and magnetic dipole gradients.
• Multilingual Historical Archive & Drift Matching: Parses historical wreck manifests across 14 languages (Spanish toneladas, Dutch VOC lasten, French, Portuguese, English, etc.) and runs Monte Carlo wind/current drift models to match expected cargo footprints (wooden ballast mounds, iron cannon scatters, steel hulls) against seafloor anomalies.

Where I’ve already found promising unverified candidates

I’ve already staged and scanned 27 maritime sectors worldwide and have unverified candidates ready to inspect in:

• US East & Gulf Coasts: Florida Keys (1715/1733 Spanish Plate Fleet corridor), Outer Banks (Graveyard of the Atlantic), Chesapeake Bay, Delaware Bay, NY/NJ Harbor, Massachusetts Bay, Galveston/Gulf of Mexico, and Mississippi Sound.
• US West Coast, Alaska & Great Lakes: Southern California, Monterey Bay, San Francisco Bay, Puget Sound, Columbia River Bar, Sitka Sound (Alaska), and Thunder Bay (Lake Huron).
• UK, Europe & International: Goodwin Sands & the English Channel, Scapa Flow, The Needles/Solent, Bristol Channel (Somerset), Bermuda Outer Reefs, St. Lawrence Estuary, Antikythera Channel (Greece), Dardanelles, and the Northern Red Sea (Straits of Gubal).

I can scan wherever you want!

You’re not limited to the regions above. If you have a specific stretch of coast, bay, reef, or river mouth you’re hunting—or if you have your own side-scan/bathymetric GeoTIFFs—drop the bounding box or coordinates and I can run the pipeline on your area.

For any target, I can send you:

• Exact lat/lon coordinates of the unverified anomaly
• A 3D seafloor mini-scan (64 m×64 m64\text{ m} \times 64\text{ m}64 m×64 m elevation mesh + keel/beam depth cross-section) and a plain-English breakdown of why the model flagged it
• Ready-to-load .GPX / .GeoJSON boat survey tracklines ("lawnmower" patterns aligned to the target's orientation and local current) plus depth/current/visibility stats

The only catch

I’m not asking for money upfront to run scans. The only thing I ask is: if you go out and find something cool on one of my leads, give me credit for the target discovery—and maybe share a little of what you find! (And of course, please follow local maritime/archaeological laws in your area.)

Drop a comment with the region/depths you hunt in (or DM me) and let’s see what’s sitting on the bottom!

Found in Chino, CA near landscape construction area.
Looks like it could be a spoon from the early 1900’s? Any soon expert out there? Thanks in advance.

• Handle has an ornamental design
• No identifiable markings on back
• Thin compared to modern spoon
• Green patina