military history, but “the injuries experienced by soldiers in a Humvee who hit an IED are different because they are injured mostly by shrapnel and the destruction of the vehicle,” Lance said. Traumatic blast injuries have unfortunately become a familiar part of recent U.S. It’s likely they also suffered traumatic brain injuries from being so close to such a large blast, Lance added.

Shear forces would tear apart the delicate structures where the blood supply meets the air supply, filling the lungs with blood and killing the crew instantly. “That creates kind of a worst case scenario for the lungs,” Lance said. While a normal blast shockwave travelling in air should last less than 10 milliseconds, Lance calculated that the Hunley crew’s lungs were subjected to 60 milliseconds or more of trauma. Lance said that when it crossed the lungs of the crewmen, the shockwave was slowed to about 30 m/s. ”When you mix these speeds together in a frothy combination like the human lungs, or hot chocolate, it combines and it ends up making the energy go slower than it would in either one,” thus amplifying the tissue damage. Unfortunately, the soft tissues that would show us what happened have decomposed in the past hundred years.”īlast-lung is a phenomenon of something Lance calls “the hot chocolate effect.” The shockwave of the blast would travel about 1500 meters per second in water, and 340 m/sec in air. “You have an instant fatality that leaves no marks on the skeletal remains. Navy’s base in Panama City, Florida for three years before entering graduate school at Duke. “This is the characteristic trauma of blast victims, they call it ‘blast lung,’” said Lance, who worked as a biomechanist at the U.S. She says the crippled sub then drifted out on a falling tide and slowly took on water before sinking. Lance says the crew died instantly from the force of the explosion travelling through the soft tissues of their bodies, especially their lungs and brains. The furthest any of the crew was from the blast was about 42 feet. The sub rammed this spar into the enemy ship’s hull and the bomb exploded. Rather, it was a copper keg of gunpowder held ahead and slightly below the Hunley’s bow on a 16-foot pole called a spar. The Hunley’s torpedo was not a self-propelled bomb, as we think of them now. 23 PLOS One, Lance calculates the likelihood of immediately fatal lung trauma to be at least 85 percent for each member of the Hunley crew. graduate of Duke Engineering, says it was a powerful shockwave from the Hunley’s weapon that killed the crew. Speculation about their deaths has included suffocation and drowning.īut after an exhaustive three-year Duke study that involved repeatedly setting blasts near a scale model, shooting authentic weapons at historically accurate iron plate and doing a lot of math on human respiration and the transmission of blast energy, researcher Rachel Lance, a 2016 Ph.D. Except for a hole in one conning tower and a small window that may have been broken, the sub was remarkably intact. They suffered no broken bones, the bilge pumps hadn’t been used and the air hatches were closed. The crewmen’s skeletons were found still at their stations along a hand-crank that drove the cigar-shaped craft.

Initially, the discovery of the submarine only seemed to deepen the mystery. Raised in 2000, the submarine is currently undergoing study and conservation in Charleston by a team of Clemson University scientists.

The fate of the crew of the 40-foot Hunley, however, remained a mystery until 1995, when the submarine was discovered about 300 meters away from the Housatonic’s resting place. Housatonic lost five seamen, but came to rest upright in 30 feet of water, which allowed the remaining crew to be rescued after climbing the rigging and deploying lifeboats. The Hunley delivered a blast from 135 pounds of black powder below the waterline at the stern of the Housatonic, sinking the Union ship in less than five minutes. 17, 1864, when it sank a 1,200-ton Union warship, the USS Housatonic, outside Charleston Harbor, South Carolina. The Hunley’s first and last combat mission occurred during the Civil War on Feb. Hunley, the first combat submarine to sink an enemy ship, also instantly killed its own eight-man crew with the powerful explosive torpedo it carried, according to new research from a Duke University Ph.D.

Hunley submarine second sinking