(ENN) -- Using the scientific equivalent of a fine-toothed comb, a team of archeologists and marine scientists is painstakingly studying a sailing ship that sank three centuries ago off the North Carolina coast.

And it's not just any sunken ship. The researchers believe -- but haven't conclusively proven -- that the vessel belonged to the famous pirate known as Blackbeard.

Born in Britain as Edward Teach, Blackbeard's sense of adventure led him from a legitimate sailing career to piracy when Queen Anne's War ended. Although he wreaked much havoc, his reign of terror was relatively brief. He and his crew terrorized the coastline of North Carolina from 1716 to 1718, bringing commerce between the colonies to a stand still several times, and once blockading the port of Charleston.

He had captured the ship from French slavers in the Bahamas and renamed it "Queen Anne's Revenge." He had a hideout near Beaufort Inlet in North Carolina. The governor of Virginia, who suspected his counterpart in North Carolina of being in collusion with the pirate, was on a quest to stop the pirate, and the ship was sunk in 1718, just a few months before Blackbeard's death. The wreck was discovered in November 1996.

So just what do scientists hope to learn from the shipwreck?

Dr. John T. Wells has been electronically digitizing old maps and marine charts of the wreck site and the surrounding area that have been produced since the early 1700s to compare with modern charts and conditions. A geologist and professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Wells is also director of UNC-CH's Institute of Marine Sciences in Morehead City. He hopes to create a history of changes over time such as shifting sands and a three-foot rise in sea level.

"We are trying not only to understand what happened to the sea and the shore in the area, but also to see the frequency of change, what hurricanes did, how sand shoals moved, how barrier islands such as Shackleford eroded and how Beaufort Inlet naturally realigned itself over time," he said.

Originally a slave ship, Blackbeard added a lot of cannons, one of which is being recovered here.

When completed, the work will be the most rigorous analysis of maps and charts of the area ever done, Wells said. Preliminary information showed Beaufort Inlet's orientation "flopped around tremendously" over the past three centuries, even more than was suspected.

Drs. Christopher Martens, William B. Aycock professor of marine sciences, and Neils Lindquist, associate professor at the institute have joined Wells in working the wreck.

"We got involved in this project at the request of the state's underwater archaeology unit to see if techniques we use could be brought to bear on unraveling some of the environmental sciences and physical sciences aspects of the wreck site," Wells said.

The three marine scientists are also studying the ebb tide delta -- a huge "halo" of sand -- that sits at the inlet mouth and would block ship traffic if not for frequent dredging. Recent data, which already suggest the wreck site silted in and was less than a meter deep in the early 1800s, may provide clues to why the ship sank. It now sits under 25 feet of water.

Martens radiocarbon-dates wood samples from the hull and anchor stocks brought up in October and other organic material such as horsehair forced into cracks between planks to seal the hull. He is also trying to establish whether artifacts such as ballast stones and hull planks have shifted in the last 50 years, which should tell something about the impact of storms.

Lindquist is studying corals and various encrusting organisms on the remaining wood and artifacts that have been recovered such as cannons, anchors, bottles, pieces of brass and ballast stones. He hopes to determine which parts of the wreck have been exposed periodically as waves and tides flushed sediments around and over it and when the exposure occurred. Other encrusting organisms of potential use in dating the wreck's history include coralline algae, bryozoans, barnacles and sea whips.

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