LANSING – Technology and the dropping water level of the upper Great Lakes are combining to uncover Michigan’s maritime secrets.

Pilots are spotting previously hidden wrecks along the Lake Superior shore, for example, and sophisticated high-tech equipment will make possible a scan next summer of the bottom Grand Traverse Bay.

“It’s becoming considerably easier than it was 20 years or 50 years ago,” Wayne Lusardi said, citing positioning equipment such as GPS systems and sidescan sonar that have become more affordable and more accurate.

Lusardi is the state’s maritime archeologist for the Department of History, Arts and Libraries.

There are surprises as well, including the recent discovery of the iron ore carrier Cyprus 460 feet below the surface of Lake Superior. The ship sank in an October 1907 storm while on route from Wisconsin to New York.

A team from the Great Lakes Shipwreck Historical Society had hunted without luck for the Cyprus several years earlier about 10 miles away, where the lone survivor reported that it had gone down.

This summer, the team was looking for the missing D.M. Clemson -- a steel freighter lost in a 1908 storm near Grand Marais -- and for a three-masted schooner, said Thomas Farnquist, executive director of the Great Lakes Shipwreck Museum in Whitefish Point.

So when the wreckage of a steel freighter showed up on sonar in August, “I was confident we’d found the D.M. Clemson,” Farnquist said. A week later, the team used a remotely operated robotic video camera to photograph the site.

“When we finally swung around and saw in raised brass letters `Cyprus’ and `Fairport’”—its home port was Fairport, Ohio—“I thought, `Oh my God, what’s it doing here?’”

The whereabouts of the D.M. Clemson remain unknown.

Another surprise came over Memorial Day weekend when a tripod sector scan—“like Doppler radar, except this works under water”—found what is believed to be an ancient shoreline, said Greg MacMaster, president of the Grand Traverse Bay Underwater Preserve Council.

“We went down to scrape off some stones. One had markings of a petroglyph,” or rock etching, of a mastodon, MacMaster said. “You could see faint signs of an ear, head, trunk, legs—pretty much 90 percent of the body—and an arrow.”

Water levels of the three upper lakes—Superior, Michigan and Huron—are well below normal, worrying environmentalists, shoreline property owners, scientists and government officials.

Yet the drop in water levels is proving a boon to shipwreck hunters.

Farnquist knows of close to a dozen shallow-water wrecks that have been spotted from the air in Lake Superior in the past two years. The cargo of some had been salvaged soon after their sinking, but the wreckage remained on the bottom to be quickly buried by sand and surf.

Now, he said, “the surf is pulling the sand away and exposing these wrecks that were once buried entirely by the sand.

“They’re great sport diver targets,” he said. “We’re hoping divers won’t start helping themselves” to artifacts.

There are no precise figures on the number of ships lost in the Great Lakes, starting with the French ship Griffon that went missing in 1679 as it crossed Lake Michigan with a load of furs.

Historical accounts indicate that about 1,500 ships have sunk in Michigan’s Great Lakes waters, and many haven’t been found, archeologists say.

An estimated 200 have sunk in Thunder Bay in a stretch of Lake Huron sweeping about 30 miles north and south of Alpena, according to Lusardi, who is based at the federal-state Thunder Bay National Marine Sanctuary. “Only about half of those have been found so far.”

The tally in Lake Superior is about 550 ships, half in the eastern third of the lake, said Farnquist, who predicted, “Over time, some will never be found because they’re so completely buried.”

MacMaster said there are oral history accounts of about 250 sinkings within sight of the Old Mission Peninsula lighthouse, which marks the separation of the East Arm and West Arm of Grand Traverse Bay.

Using state-of-the-art multi-beam sensor equipment from Sweden, his team plans to do a complete scan of the bay in the summer of 2008, a process he compares to mowing the lawn.

“You’re able to scan the bottomlands right down to the centimeter. You’ll be able to pick up zebra mussels, invasive species, anything protruding like shipwrecks and other deformities,” he said.

Many wrecks are within Michigan’s 11 underwater preserves, which include about 2,400 square miles of lakes Michigan, Huron and Superior bottomlands.

Regardless of location, shipwrecks are legally protected, and it’s a felony to disturb or remove artifacts.

The preserves are popular among recreational divers, and nearby communities promote them as a tourism draw.

A potential 12th preserve encompassing 295 square miles of Grand Traverse Bay is under review by the Department of Environmental Quality, which administers the underwater preserve system.