She helps unearth the submerged history of the Great Lakes

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To Tamara Thomsen, shipwrecks are not tragedies frozen in time — they are stories waiting to resurface.

As a maritime archaeologist in Wisconsin, in the American Midwest, she spends many of her days descending into the Great Lakes to uncover lives and moments that have been submerged for centuries.

“Shipwrecks are time capsules of the past,” she said. “They tell us about the people who were onboard, what their lives were like, and the evolution of design with respect to shipbuilding.”

Thomsen credits her career, in part, to a scuba diving class she took as an undergraduate at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She later became a diving instructor to help pay for graduate school. “When I got my master’s, I knew I wanted to figure out a way