This Legendary Ship Sank Without Warning. Fifty Years Later, Science Could Finally Solve the Mystery of the Edmund Fitzgerald.

It was a calm and clear afternoon when the Edmund Fitzgerald left port in Superior, Wisconsin, on November 9, 1975. The enormous ship carried more than 26, 000 tons of iron ore in the form of taconite pellets for a journey to the steel mills of Detroit. In many ways, the trip was routine; the Fitzgerald had been traveling this route, from Lake Superior to Lake Huron to Lake Erie and back, for more than 15 years. But the cold waters of Lake Superior had a long history of taking ships down with severe and sudden storms. And the Fitz, by then, had been pushed hard, potentially harboring underlying damage, although that claim remains up for debate. With a storm approaching from the southwest, Captain Ernest M. McSorley steered the Fitz north toward the wind-blocking highlands on the Canadian shoreline before pivoting southeast toward the sheltered waters of Whitefish Bay, Michigan. Following close behind was another ship, the Arthur M. Anderson. The two captains-McSorley on the Fitzgerald and Bernie Cooper on the Anderson-stayed in contact by radio as the wind picked up early the next morning. By the afternoon of November 10, gusts of 90 mph were whipping snow into squalls. Waves swelled to the height of a two-story building and crashed over the ships with such magnitude that, Cooper would later say, up to 12 feet of water accumulated on his deck at times. Trouble began for the Fitz around 3: 30 p. m., when McSorley told Cooper that his ship had some damage: snapped railings on the deck and broken vents on ballast tanks, which could have been taking on water. The ship wasn’t exactly falling apart, but these were signs that the storm was taking a toll. The Fitz started listing to one side. Every time a swell rose, the Fitz dropped off the Anderson’s radar. Next, the Fitz’s radar malfunctioned. McSorley slowed his ship so the Anderson could catch up and keep an eye on it. The end came a few hours later, and it happened quickly. Cooper checked in with McSorley just before 7 p. m., after two huge waves had crashed over the Anderson’s bow before rolling toward the Fitzgerald. McSorley said he was holding his own. But at 7: 15 p. m., the Anderson’s radar lost the Fitz again. This time it never reappeared. The Fitzgerald was gone, along with all 29 crew members. Whitefish Bay was just 17 miles away. Fifty years later, the sinking of the Edmund Fitzgerald remains embedded in cultural memory, in large part because of the Canadian singer Gordon Lightfoot, who wrote a song about the ship’s final voyage that became a top 10 Billboard hit in 1976. (The haunting ballad’s popularity is so enduring that a character on the Apple TV+ show Severance whistled the melody on an episode earlier this year.) Along with many dozens of books, articles, documentaries, and expeditions to the wreck site-with more in the works-the song has helped make the Fitzgerald, like the Titanic, one of history’s most famous sunken ships. It is far from the only one. Thousands of other vessels have gone down in the Great Lakes in the last few hundred years, hundreds of them still undiscovered. Each one embeds untold stories, and a dedicated network of searchers are eager to find them before those stories are lost forever. When it comes to the Fitzgerald, there is one mystery in particular that has fueled years of debate and speculation. The massive ship wasn’t the only vessel on the lake that stormy November night. But it was the only one that sank, despite being built to withstand even worse conditions. It went down rapidly and without any survivors. What happened in those final minutes? The Edmund Fitzgerald was a feat of engineering when it launched in 1958. Commissioned by the Northwestern Mutual Life Insurance Company of Milwaukee and named after the company’s president, it was the longest ship moving through the Great Lakes at the time. At 729 feet, it was designed to just barely fit into the Soo Locks, which connect Lake Superior to Lake Huron through the St. Lawrence Seaway. Workers couldn’t close the main gate of the locks behind it, says Ric Mixter, a former television reporter and the author of Tattletale Sounds: The Edmund Fitzgerald Investigations. Mixter visited the wreck in a submersible in the 1990s and has been researching its demise for decades. “It was just a marvel,” he says. “It was a monster of a vessel.” The Fitzgerald’s rapid disappearance-with an experienced captain during a storm that was bad but not unusual by Great Lakes standards-raised questions from the very beginning. According to Mixter, the National Enquirer ran a story after the accident claiming that the crew had been abducted by aliens. “That’s how weird this was that nobody came off this wreck,” Mixter says. The search started before the night-or the storm-was over. As soon as the Anderson reached Whitefish Bay, the U. S. Coast Guard asked Cooper to go back to the site of the Fitz’s disappearance, where his crew found two lifeboats and some other debris but no signs of survivors or the huge ship. Over the next few days, the Coast Guard sent planes and boats equipped with sonar and magnetic anomaly detectors, according to the Great Lakes Shipwreck Museum. The search team found strong signs that the ship lay hundreds of feet under water. Then winter settled in. After six long, cold months, the search resumed in May 1976, when a Coast Guard crew used a system called side-scan sonar, which sends out an array of sound pulses, measures how long it takes for echoes to return, and then translates that time into distance as well as, in turn, a reconstructed image. Once the crew had pinpointed the location of what they suspected was the wreck, they sent down the U. S. Navy’s cable-controlled undersea recovery vehicle (CURV), a precursor to more modern remotely operated vehicles (ROVs). Over 56 hours of dive time, the CURV collected about 900 photographs and 43, 000 feet of videotape, revealing an upside-down stern marked with the words EDMUND FITZGERALD. Nearly two decades of speculation followed about what, exactly, went wrong. The official Coast Guard report, which was released in July 1977, and a report the following year from the National Transportation Safety Board, concluded that the ship most likely had gone down because of ineffective hatch closures that facilitated flooding of the cargo. That would have caused the ship to list and then sink. “The vessel dove into a wall of water and never recovered, with the breaking up of the ship occuring [sic] as it plunged or as the ship struck the bottom,” the Coast Guard analyst wrote. But the initial investigations were complicated by high-profile lawsuits. Families of the crew members sued Northwestern Mutual and the company it used to operate the ship. A lawyer uncovered rumors that the Fitz had been compromised before it set out and that McSorley knew it. Media reports sensationalized the story, Mixter says, leading to a settlement before the cases could go to trial. In his interpretation, this sequence of events prevented all the facts from coming out. To get to the bottom of what happened, there were government expeditions as well as independent ones. Jacques Cousteau’s son Jean-Michel explored the site in a submarine as a side excursion while he was in the Great Lakes area for other reasons in 1980. An ROV went down for the first time in 1989. Mixter was on a team that visited the site in 1994. During a submersible dive, he saw a screwdriver stuck in the mud and blankets hanging out of the ship’s windows, driving home the reality of all that was lost. Divers from the same expedition vessel who went down 30 minutes after he did spotted a body on the lakebed. The sailor wore a life jacket and coveralls. The number of headlines about the find rivaled those about the initial sinking of the ship, Mixter says. With cameras in their faces and a frenzy of reporters asking for comments, some families of the deceased crewmen became livid. A mother and a daughter led a fight for legislation to prevent diving to the ship-which officially lies in Canadian waters-without a permit. They won. Mixter says the Canadian government stopped issuing permits to look for the Fitz and later updated the law to exclude sonar, too. The seventh and last dive to the Fitz happened in 1995, when the Great Lakes Shipwreck Historical Society retrieved the ship’s 200-pound bronze bell, which served as alarm, timekeeper, and warning signal. (The bell is now on display in the Great Lakes Shipwreck Museum.) The only excavation that has happened since then has been in the form of books, documentaries, podcasts, and intense speculation about what exactly happened. The Great Lakes hold 21 percent of our planet’s surface freshwater, and those water bodies have hosted bustling shipping lanes for hundreds of years, according to the Wisconsin Historical Society. Since at least the 1600s, vessels have transported lumber, copper, grain, taconite, and other materials between ports around the Midwest. Shipping in the Great Lakes remains a valuable industry. As of 2023, according to an economic impact report by a private consulting firm, 241, 000 U. S. and Canadian jobs depend on maritime commerce along the Great Lakes Seaway System, which extends from Duluth, Minnesota, to Montreal, Quebec. Shipping in the region accounts for more than $36 billion in economic activity each year. Many cities on the route trace their origins to trading posts built during the early years of European settlement before railroads or major roads. The waterways were the highways. Navigating the Great Lakes can be dangerous, and it used to be more so. In the early days, vessels tended to be underpowered and overloaded, says Bruce Lynn, executive director of the Great Lakes Shipwreck Historical Society in Sault Ste. Marie, Michigan. Captains didn’t have the luxury of modern weather forecasting or current navigational and communication technologies like cellphones, GPS, and highly accurate radar, all of which could help them detect shallows or avoid collisions. Harbors can be dozens of miles apart from each other along rocky and sparsely populated shorelines, which means there is nowhere to make an emergency stop if you get into trouble. And back then, there was no easy way to call for help. Weather was-and still is-a major hazard, Lynn says. Storms can gather a lot of energy as they move over massive bodies of water. In Lake Superior-which reaches depths of 1, 300 feet and contains more water than all the other lakes combined and then some-waves that struck the Fitzgerald likely exceeded 25 feet, wrote researchers from NOAA’s National Weather Service in an analysis of the storm that swallowed the Fitz. November is an especially treacherous time of year, according to historical records and NOAA data. As fall turns to winter, arctic air blows in from Canada and Alaska, while warm air and moisture come up from the Gulf. These air masses meet over the Rockies, creating low pressure systems that ride the jet stream and pass over the lakes, where clouds build and storms intensify. Because the Great Lakes are enclosed basins, waves can pile up much closer together than ocean waves do, raising the risk that ships will slam into successive swells, strike the bottom in shallow areas between waves, or get swamped. Once trouble strikes, extremely cold water makes surviving a calamity in the Great Lakes difficult. Topography is an added complication-to both navigation and wreck hunting, says Travis White, a research engineer at Michigan Technological University’s Great Lakes Research Center in Houghton. The lakes are so big that it can be hard to fathom their size. Lake Superior alone is the size of Maine and gets as deep as the Empire State Building is tall. The lakes are full of submerged sea mounts, shoals, and bluffs that form sheer cliffs-all hidden underwater. In the depths of the lakes, White adds, you can’t see the bottom from a plane, satellite, or ship without equipment. As famous as the Fitzgerald is, it is far from the only ship that has succumbed to these hazards, says Brendon Baillod, a maritime historian and president of the Wisconsin Underwater Archaeology Association. Although not a Fitzgerald expert, he has spent decades digging through historical records to help produce a database of other stories like it that are far more overlooked. With help from collaborators, he has documented about 6, 000 losses of commercial vessels on the Great Lakes between 1678 and 2000. Most of them sank between 1830 and 1930. Adding abandoned ships, old fish tugs, and burned yachts brings the number as high as 10, 000. Baillod suspects that about 1, 000 shipwrecks are yet to be found both in deep waters and buried under beaches or broken up on reefs. About 700 of those lie offshore. At least seven of the still-undiscovered wrecks are big freighters, Mixter adds, including a 550-footer that went down in Lake Huron in a notorious 1913 storm. And while there are wrecks in all five of the Great Lakes, a substantial number occur in clusters. Among them: a 200-mile stretch of Michigan coastline known as the Shipwreck Coast, where the Fitzgerald lies. In his searches, Mixter has found 14 ships in the region, including an entire lumber fleet that sank in 1914. Given the complexities and dangers embedded through the lakes, hunting for wrecks is also harder than it might seem. It was late on a July night in 1994 when the Anglian Lady left the dock in Sault Ste. Marie carrying a tiny yellow submersible named Delta. Mixter was aboard the tugboat, along with explorer Fred Shannon, Shannon’s wife, Betty, and a crew of 16 that included photographers, boat operators, and submersible pilots. The Lady passed through the Soo Locks around midnight, finally reaching Whitefish Bay in Lake Superior at dawn. Shannon made the first dive a couple of hours later, on a day so gorgeous that Mixter, wearing a wetsuit, jumped into the water to cool off and get some video footage of Delta’s descent. He joined the day’s third submersible dive, starting in the late afternoon. When the sub reached the bottom at 550 feet, Mixter was surprised that there was no sand-just mud and rocks. On the hull of the ship, he saw the word EDMUND, now faded and rusted over. As he filmed and tried to take everything in, he suddenly got spooked at the sight of water on the floor of the sub but then relaxed when the pilot told him it was just condensation from their breath. At around 6 p. m., after two mesmerizing hours underwater, Delta returned Mixter to the surface in time for one more dive, which carried the Lady’s owner and his 12-year-old son. They were the ones who spotted the crewman. He was lying faceup outside the ship by an open door near the bow on the port side. As a media frenzy ensued, the find sparked a slew of new questions. Had the sailor tried to escape through the door, or did he fall off the ship? Was his neck broken, as it appeared to Mixter? Had the crewman even been on the Fitz, or was the body there before the ship went down? These new mysteries compounded the bigger one: What happened here? As the unknowns continue to linger decades later, technological advances have raised a tantalizing possibility: Maybe science could be the key to finding answers. By the time Mixter dived to the wreck, sonar had improved significantly, producing images with better resolution than what the first search crews had been able to get right after the crash. Since then, tools have become far more affordable and accessible, facilitating a new era of mystery solving for shipwreck hunters. ROVs, which could easily cost $100,000 a few decades ago, now go for about $2,000, Baillod says. Submarines, too, are cheaper than they were in the Fitz’s day. Sonar systems have gone DIY. “It used to be if you wanted to get a side-scan sonar, you had to buy commercial scientific equipment that cost probably $50,000,” Baillod says. In 2023, he and a colleague used an off-the-shelf Garmin fishfinder to build a sonar device on a custom-made towfish for about $1,000 total. They called it the Wreck Sniffer Mark 1 and used it to locate a 140-foot schooner, the Trinidad. The ship had been sitting at a depth of 260 feet in Lake Michigan since the 1880s. Figuring out where to aim sonar is now easier with help from accurate GPS, electronic navigation, and Google Earth. Scientists are developing AI programs that incorporate data on known shipwrecks in order to locate new ones. Modern searchers also benefit from sonar-equipped autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) and close-range cameras on ROVs. They can get help from magnetometers, autonomous boats that carry sonar, lidar for shallow water, and photogrammetry, a process of turning two-dimensional images into three-dimensional ones. Much of that technology was either nonexistent or operating on much cruder levels when the Fitz was on the water. Today, about 20 groups are involved in serious searches for wrecks in the Great Lakes, Baillod estimates, and they use a range of tools depending on their resources. Many specialize on specific lakes or areas of the lakes. The Great Lakes Shipwreck Museum, where Lynn works and Mixter is on the board, operates on the largest scale with the biggest budget, funded in large part by tens of thousands of visitors who buy tickets to see the museum’s Fitzgerald exhibit each year. Successful wreck searchers also include self-funded individuals who make their own equipment, and a retired bookkeeper who, until recently, parachuted over the lakes after storms. Tamara Thomsen, a maritime archaeologist at the Wisconsin Historical Society in Madison, says jumping out of planes was a hobby for her, and she often spotted exposed wrecks near the shoreline from the air. If it ever becomes possible to return to the site of the Fitz with the technologies available now, Mixter believes, there’s so much more researchers could uncover. Today’s sonar alone, he says, offers 50 percent better resolution. Without even diving, they could collect new information. “We could tow a sonar over the top and it would show us resolution right down to a two-inch rope,” he says. “We could easily see.” As searches continue for shipwrecks in the Great Lakes, the Fitzgerald is once again dominating headlines in 2025. To commemorate the 50th anniversary of its final voyage, planned events include a private memorial service for families, museum tours for the public, and a relay swim that will start where the ship went down and finish 411 miles away in Detroit-the Fitz’s destination in November 1975. Commemorating the anniversary, experts say, offers an opportunity to celebrate the history of the region and to appreciate how much safer the Great Lakes are for ships today than they were 50 years ago. The Fitz was the last large ore ship to sink in the open waters of the Great Lakes, Baillod says. That’s thanks in part to changes in safety regulations and equipment that followed the disaster, including improvements to navigational charts and requirements for GPS devices and depth finders. In one near miss, a vessel called the Michipicoten experienced an age-related hull failure on Lake Superior last year. With modern pumping equipment and the ability to summon immediate help, the ship survived a calamity that 40 years earlier would have sent it to the bottom, Baillod says. At the same time, ship owners no longer take the kinds of chances they used to. As for what happened the night the mighty Fitz went under, theories abound. Some experts have argued that the ship sank first, and then broke once it hit the bottom. Captain Cooper on the Anderson thought the Fitzgerald might have bottomed out in a shoal during the storm and that McSorley knew it was sinking. Investigators with the Great Lakes Historical Society suggest that the bow went under first, but they haven’t been able to explain why it took on enough water to sink. Some think the ship was overloaded. Based on his research and dive to the wreck, Mixter is convinced that the Fitzgerald had structural issues and that the crew had failed to tie down all the hatches, allowing water from the storm to flood the vessel and pull it under. The Coast Guard and a cook who had previously worked on the Fitz told Mixter there were problems with the keel. “Every time they went through a storm, the ship would weaken a little bit,” he says. “By the cook’s own report, he said the captain knew that they fixed the keel, but it was already loose again, and he went through five more storms in 1975.” In a documentary Mixter made about Shannon’s 1994 expedition, video footage shows the front half of the vessel intact, marked with the words EDMUND FITZGERALD. The stern area is “twisted and torn,” Mixter says. From the sub, Mixter says he didn’t see any taconite pellets in the front of the ship, suggesting that the it hadn’t gone down bow first-something he would love to take a closer look at if he could get back to the site. Mixter suspects that a fracture happened on the surface and that the stern flipped over so quickly that nobody could even get to the radio. Nothing has been moved since the Fitz went down, which means plenty of clues are sitting down there, undisturbed. Mixter is hopeful that expeditions will be allowed back now that the most vocal families of the crew members have died. If he could return, he would take a picture of every hatch clamp and investigate the location of the taconite, among other remains. “It’s really simple to say the Edmund Fitzgerald went down in a storm. That’s exactly what happened,” Mixter says. “But the big question is, what were those final moments like? Why couldn’t they get to the radio to call for help? And is everybody trapped inside? No one has done a good survey to know.”.
https://www.popularmechanics.com/science/a68916062/edmund-fitzgerald-mystery/