Last week, the Lake Guardian left the port of Oswego, N.Y., preparing to sail into the nation’s past. The research vessel, which belongs to the Environmental Protection Agency, is exploring the Lake Ontario National Marine Sanctuary, a 1,722-square-mile expanse that stretches from the shoreline of New York State to the (watery) border with Canada.

There, 63 ships rest beneath hundreds of feet of cold, clear water. Many had sailed in the service of nation-building some time during the 19th century, only to succumb to bad weather, rough seas, the vagaries of fate.

Now, the maritime archaeologists aboard the Lake Guardian — experts with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Ocean Exploration Cooperative Institute, students from the University of Rhode Island — aim to create detailed three-dimensional computer models of the wrecks, starting with about a dozen ships.

They will do so with the help of Rhody, a remotely operated vehicle, or ROV, outfitted with a high-definition camera that has provided astonishing images on which those models will be based. (On Friday morning, the team began a YouTube livestream, accessible in the link below, of a vessel marked on a previous survey. In an early morning email, the researchers said they were “blown away and stunned by what we have found.”)

“There’s lifetimes worth of research potential here,” Benjamin Ioset, a NOAA maritime archaeologist, said as the expedition commenced. A native of central New York, he began diving in these waters when he was 14. “I’ve always been in love with this region,” Dr. Ioset said. Now, he is a conduit to that region’s prosperous, industrial past. When the Lake Guardian returned briefly to port on Thursday in order to host a visit from Oswego High School students, he was inspired by the teenagers’ curiosity, their amazement at the secrets buried in the familiar lake. Shipwrecks, after all, belong in the Mediterranean or the Arctic … don’t they?