Moshe Friedman, spokesman for the Israeli Infrastructure Ministry, said Thursday that he had not heard of the natural gas fields and would not be able to comment without more details. It was that search that led to the gas discovery, he explained. We were using sonar to get what we call an acoustic signature and ran around the ships at different angles. He said they would find a depression in the sea floor and something hard within the depression - the hard object turned out to be the ships. After the researchers finished their work on the Phoenician ships, they steamed along the coast to look for other sunken vessels.
Gas seeps through cracks The sonar detected what appeared to be hundreds of ships.
The long narrow depressions were probably associated with cracks in the earth that create a way for the gas to escape from underground reservoirs, he said. Ballard also reported finding concentrations of tube worms and beds of clams surrounding the vents. These were similar to those he found surrounding hydrothermal vents near the Galapagos Islands in the Pacific, he said. The Galapagos worms marked the first discovery of living things that used chemical energy rather that relying on the sun for energy. Ballard, president of the Institute for Exploration in Mystic, Conn., is a longtime ocean explorer, probably best known for locating the wreck of the Titanic in the cold, dark waters of the North Atlantic.