Abandoned Shipwrecks Act particular case of the salvage of the "Nuestra Señora de Atocha", an historic and culturally significant wreck off the coast of Florida, in which the State of Florida was unable to prevent illegal salvage operations due to a lack of a suitable law that would disallow it, spurred action at the federal level to address the situation. On April 29, 1988, President Ronald Reagan signed the bill (Abandoned Shipwrecks Act of 1987, Pub. L. 100-298, 102 Stat. 432) into law. The law provides that any wreck that lies embedded in a state's submerged lands is property of that state and
The World Without Us only one class in the spring semester, and he was free to travel and conduct research the rest of the year. The idea for "The World Without Us" was suggested to Weisman in 2004 by Josie Glausiusz, an editor at "Discover". She had pondered the idea for several years and asked Weisman to write a feature on the subject after she re-read "Journey through a Doomed Land", an article he published in 1994 in "Harper's Magazine" about the state of Chernobyl eight years after abandonment. His "Discover" article, "Earth Without People", published in the February 2005 issue and re-printed in