6. USS Independence Aircraft Carrier
The CVL 22, or more commonly known as the Independence, was part of a total of 90 ships that had been assigned to the Operation Crossroads mission – which were the tests being undertaken for the atomic bombs. These were taking place at the Bikini Atoll located in the Marshall Islands. In 1951 the ship was scuttled and not many people were aware of what it had been used for following its involvement in the atomic bomb tests.
It was in 2015 that the shipwreck was found. A team of researchers began to work on the comparisons of sonar images taken of the wreckage with those from declassified documents. This allowed them to figure out that this ship had subsequently been utilized as a nuclear waste receptacle and radiology laboratory between 1946 and 1950. This had been one of the initial ships that had been converted into a lightweight aircraft carrier after most of the American fleet had been destroyed during the Pearl Harbor Attack. The main areas in which the independence operated in was the western and central Pacific between November of 1943 and August of 1945.
Following the war, it received its designation to the Operation Crossroads and it was as part of the fleet that had been placed approximately 1,700 feet away from where the ground zero blasts took place. This was done in order to see what effects the radiation, heat and shock waves would have on the ships. In total, during this testing period, there were a total of 21 ships that were sunk, but the Independence did manage to survive despite having received a lot of significant damage during the War. The ship eventually sank after there were two torpedoes precisely fired at it near to the keel and not near where the nuclear waste had been stored, which occurred in January of 1951.