Marano and former Rosenstiel School graduate student Devon Fogarty, who played a key role in the discovery, recounted the monthslong process that went into finding the hospital and cemetery. The national park service only recently announced the discovery to coincide with preservation month, which is celebrated in May.

The mysterious dots turned out to be the remnants of pylons that made up the hospital’s foundation-the space between them matching to a tee the measurements of the hospital Marano had located in records. Swimming parallel lines from north to south over the shallow area, and using a GPS tracker to maintain their course, he and two other divers discovered the remains of the quarantine hospital and cemetery he had researched and read about in official records. Then, one day in mid-August 2022, Marano finally got the chance. Hurricane Irma and a year’s long active-duty deployment as a Coast Guard reservist during the height of the pandemic would delay that plan. So, he promised himself to one day explore the site with a team of divers. “We still needed to get in the water and get eyes on it,” Marano said. Once he returned to the mainland, he did a little sleuthing, learning that the area was a submerged island near the 100-square-mile park where a 19 th-century quarantine hospital and cemetery once may have been located. “Usually, that indicates there’s some kind of manmade structure.”Ĭould the peculiar dots have been navigational aids from a bygone era? Marano wasn’t sure. “Very early in my archaeological career, I was taught that you don’t find patterns or rigid shapes in nature,” said Marano, an adjunct professor in the Exploration Sciences Program at the University of Miami Rosenstiel School of Marine, Atmospheric, and Earth Science.

Maritime archaeologist Joshua Marano had taken the short flight on numerous occasions, traveling to the park’s historic Fort Jefferson to assist in restoration projects.īut one day in the summer of 2016, as the seaplane descended for an aquatic landing, Marano saw something unusual: an L-shaped pattern of dots below the water. The view from the passenger window of the turboprop seaplane always had been the same: miles and miles of clear blue water as the aircraft made the 30-minute flight from Key West to Dry Tortugas National Park.

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