How Magnet Fishers Catch Underwater Rubbish, Weapons and Generally Treasure

Magnet fisher James Kane cradles a shiny, four-pound magnetic disk: a stainless-steel shell housing an alloy of iron, neodymium and boron. He hucks it right into a lake in a public park in New York Metropolis, then tugs it slowly towards shore with a sturdy artificial rope. Because the highly effective magnet bump bump bumps alongside the underside, it kicks up a line of bubbles—after which immediately there’s a heavy drag, as if the lake mattress has turned to taffy. The magnet is caught to one thing. Filmed by his companion Barbi Agostini, Kane hoists their dripping catch: a thick iron rod referred to as a sash weight, a counterbalance used to open heavy home windows a century in the past.

Over the subsequent few hours on this October afternoon, Kane and Agostini additionally pull in a 20-year-old flip cellphone, a signpost, fishing hooks and lures, pliers, bottle caps, batteries and an iPhone 6. They provide the smartphone to a woman who’s close by along with her associates, fishing for bluegills. “If it works, I’m going to be so happy!” she says. Then she sniffs the cellphone and wrinkles her nostril. “It smells.”

To magnet fish is to plumb unseen depths for sunken treasure, but it surely additionally means getting acquainted with the smelly, the scummy and the weird. Agostini’s magnet as soon as clanked onto the lid of a mason jar, inside which floated a useless tarantula in purple liquid. A very thrilling catch can convey headlines—or the police. The American zeal for weapons has sown firearms under the waterline, and magnet fishers harvest them with regularity. Agostini and Kane have discovered pistols, shotgun components, Revolutionary Battle–period grapeshot and fashionable ammo clips. The 2 magnet fishers name the police every time they discover a gun, and so they achieve this typically sufficient that some officers acknowledge them. Final yr Kane pulled an inert hand grenade out of New York Metropolis’s East River, summoning the police division’s bomb squad to a complicated waterfront block in Queens. However the pair’s most notable catch—and possibly essentially the most well-known factor ever discovered by U.S. magnet fishers, which Kane says has earned them a point out in an upcoming quantity of Ripley’s Imagine It or Not!—was a protected containing stacks of waterlogged money, pulled from a river this previous Could.

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The $100 payments have been so degraded that Agostini and Kane don’t but know exactly how a lot they discovered, however primarily based on the stacks’ thickness, they estimate the overall was $50,000 to $80,000. As quickly as they might achieve this after the catch, they took a Megabus to Washington, D.C., at hand ship the cash to the Mutilated Forex Division on the federal Bureau of Engraving and Printing. There will probably be counted and ultimately paid out to the pair, although processing would possibly take just a few years—Kane says they’re in line behind individuals who had payments blackened by final yr’s lethal wildfires in Hawaii.

Agostini and Kane, each age 40, didn’t get into this pastime anticipating to get wealthy; principally they needed one thing to do outdoors through the COVID pandemic. Magnet fishing, alongside baking sourdough bread and fixing jigsaw puzzles, took off within the early months of 2020. “Magnet fishing was so COVID-friendly. You were forced to distance yourself” even if you happen to bumped right into a fellow hobbyist open air, says Pittsburgh-based archeologist Ben Demchak, who sells specialised magnets via his firm, Kratos Magnetics. Magnet fishers, he explains, want to provide one another a large berth within the area; their highly effective lures have a tendency towards mutual attraction.

Social media algorithms boosted the interest, too. Reddit has a magnet fishing discussion board with almost 220,000 members. On YouTube, channels corresponding to Kane and Agostini’s Let’s Get Magnetic emphasize the thrills, modifying out hours of dragging and dipping for the second a treasured or peculiar merchandise is yanked out of darkish water. However magnet fishers say that what has lasting enchantment, and makes up the majority of their time, is taking trash out of the setting. “It’s a good thing to do. You’re cleaning up the water. It’s an amazing feeling,” says Colt Busch, a magnet fisher in Maine, who not too long ago found an vintage Coca-Cola bottle, intact however empty, embedded in a clump of metallic scraps.

Magnet fishers don’t at all times get a heat reception. Strolling close to the lakeside after their newest catch, Kane and Agostini are approached by a member of a nonprofit group that companions with town to assist preserve the park. She tells them magnet fishing isn’t permitted right here. She provides that she hasn’t referred to as the police—a minimum of, not this time.

Neodymium’s Mighty Pull

Nobody would be capable of fish with neodymium magnets in any respect if it weren’t for metallurgist John Croat and engineer Masato Sagawa. Within the early Eighties Croat, then on the Basic Motors Analysis Laboratories, and Sagawa, then on the Sumitomo Particular Metals Company, have been each trying to find options to cobalt and samarium magnets, that are highly effective however costly. Independently and nearly concurrently, Sagawa and Croat recognized the identical intermetallic compound, which is a substance with a hard and fast ratio of parts: on this case, two atoms of the uncommon earth ingredient neodymium to 14 iron atoms to 1 boron atom. “That didn’t exist yet,” Croat says. “The discovery of that intermetallic compound is the invention.” You’ll be able to’t journey over a rock with the chemical composition Nd₂Fe₁₄B. Such magnets should be created artificially, via sintering or bonding. In what Croat describes as a “shock,” every occurred to announce their discovery on the similar convention in Pittsburgh in November 1983. Then they modified the world.

Neodymium magnets weren’t merely extra reasonably priced. They have been sturdy sufficient to allow miniaturized pc exhausting drives and tinier, mightier electrical motors. Wind turbine cores have neodymium magnets to effectively flip kinetic power into electrical energy. They’re additionally key parts of headphones and audio system, and so they stay the preferred rare-earth magnets bought commercially. “I don’t think they will ever come up with a better magnet,” Croat says.

Neodymium magnets, regardless of their title, are principally iron. Such magnets include areas “where all the electrons are lined up like soldiers on parade, all facing in the same direction,” says Andrea Sella, a professor of chemistry at College Faculty London. In neodymium magnets and different everlasting magnets—which don’t require electrical currents or different exterior assist to remain magnetic—a number of layers of those aligned electrons stack up. The end result will be imagined as a sample like three-dimensional wallpaper. Sella likens the construction to a sequence of endless nightmares. “Every time you move a certain distance, oh, my God, you’re back where you started,” he says. The neodymium, even in a comparatively tiny quantity, helps pin the iron atoms in place on this repetitive crystalline lattice.

“Magnetism is really a reflection at a macroscopic scale of the quantum phenomenon called spin,” Sella says. This property is usually described by way of an atom’s nucleus or its particles spinning about an axis. However that’s a reasonably crude psychological image, he says. The fact is that spin “represents something about the fundamental nature of the particle.”

As a quantum phenomenon, magnetism may appear ethereal. However it could actually shortly change into a lot much less so when dealing with precise neodymium magnets: Agostini says she as soon as discovered herself caught to a subway seat, held quick by a magnet in her backpack. If two neodymium magnets get too shut, they will slam collectively, crushing a wayward finger in a painful metallic sandwich. When two of them unintentionally bump one another, Kane strains to separate them, like he’s breaking up the world’s most irritating KitKat bar.

Shops like Demchak’s promote neodymium magnets in keeping with their form and pull drive, measured within the hundreds of kilos. A “360,” as an illustration, is a stable magnet housed in a metallic cylinder. To adjust to the rules for delivery these objects by air, Demchak nests them in packing containers of froth to buffer the magnetic fields. Delivery magnets within the U.S. by floor doesn’t have such restrictions, he says, though he now packs these parcels fastidiously, too. He realized his lesson after promoting his first 360—which by no means made it to the client. It most likely received caught someplace in a mail processing plant, he says. Or perhaps it’s nonetheless on the market, clamped to the stomach of a supply truck.

Deep Cleansing?

As soon as the Bureau of Engraving and Printing sends them the funds from the mutilated money, Agostini and Kane say they need to use the cash towards a down fee to maneuver out of New York Metropolis. Agostini wish to purchase a spot with sufficient house to boost chickens, canines and goats. She loves animals, she says, and considers magnet fishing to be an extension of this as a result of it helps clear air pollution from their habitat.

“If you really talk to magnet fishers, you can tell they have a sense of pride about it—they’re cleaning up the waterways,” Demchak says. For instance, he notes that magnet fishers not too long ago helped pull lots of of electrical scooters out of a river that runs via the campus at Michigan State College. Busch says he has caught greater than 140 bicycles since he started magnet fishing. And there’s a lot extra trash to gather. “As much as I clean up the water,” Busch says, “I feel like there’s three times as much junk left to pull up.”

If there have been complete scientific reviews on the environmental affect of magnet fishing, they aren’t in any mainstream databases. Solely a handful of research even reference the interest, corresponding to a 2024 evaluation within the journal Hydrobiologia of Hungarian magnet fishers’ social media posts that evaluated how a lot discarded fishing gear had been recovered since 2016. Images and movies posted on-line confirmed that magnet fishers pulled in additional than 2,000 items of substances, together with rods, reels, hooks and different gadgets, from Hungary’s waterways.

It’s useful when magnet fishers take away sharp bits of metallic, which will be bodily hazards to swimmers and wildlife, factors out Timothy Hoellein, an aquatic ecologist at Loyola College Chicago, who research trash in freshwater environments. Digital units and batteries additionally include heavy metals, corresponding to cadmium and mercury, plus different chemical substances which might be doubtlessly poisonous to “microorganisms, or invertebrates, or fish or people,” he says. Uninteresting iron shouldn’t be a specific hazard to something, although, he says; soils already include pure iron and rust.

However lake beds can host issues worse than rust. Poisonous chemical substances corresponding to polychlorinated biphenyls, or PCBs, can persist with charged particles in sediments. Effective silts and clays additionally retain pollution corresponding to microplastics and particles from nuclear fallout, in addition to vitamins, together with nitrogen and phosphorous, which might hurt ecosystems if concentrations are too excessive. Releasing these trapped supplies presents a doable draw back to magnet fishing. “Any practice that could disturb the sediment at the bottom of a lake, especially an urban or periurban lake, has the potential to resuspend this sediment—and any associated pollutant—back into the water column,” says Phil Owens, an environmental sciences professor on the College of Northern British Columbia. Whether or not magnet fishing has a “net positive or net negative effect on lakes and ponds” might depend upon the person physique of water, its environment and the depth of magnet fishing exercise. 

Hoellein hypothesizes that such disturbances are minor relative to magnet fishing’s potential advantages. “There could be some sediments with industrial chemicals or other pollutants that are released back into the water through magnet fishing, but I don’t know if it would be that different than a major storm coming through” and agitating a lake ground, he says.

Plus, magnet fishing dredges up an extra perk: it will get individuals open air, the place they will get pleasure from often-overlooked waterways. A couple of city our bodies of water are shunned for a superb cause, although—the Environmental Safety Company says New York Metropolis’s sludgy Gowanus Canal is without doubt one of the most contaminated water our bodies within the U.S. (Kane would like to magnet fish there however says he hasn’t as a result of the canal water is “very bad for your health if you get it in your facial area.”) However many different aquatic areas in cities are unfairly dismissed as too harmful or disagreeable to be round, Hoellein says. Or they’re handled as junkyards. That’s a counterproductive angle, he says, “especially in places where we also drink from that same water.” He welcomes anybody who needs to contribute, in their very own fashion and with the time they’ve, to fixing the issue of environmental trash. “For some people, that’s magnet fishing,” Hoellein provides.

Know earlier than You Throw

On the shore, the magnet fishers and the nonprofit staffer attain a détente; the dialogue turns to a mutual appreciation for native historical past. Later, privately, Kane insists he has performed by the e book: he has a fishing license and a metal-detecting license, and this lake is in a public park.

Magnet fishing is permitted in publicly accessible locations within the U.S. However it may additionally be topic to native guidelines and rules. Though magnet fishing shouldn’t be particularly talked about by the New York Metropolis Division of Parks & Recreation in its publicly listed rules, “using magnets to retrieve sunken metal objects can have negative impacts on local wildlife and is against [Parks] rules in any bodies of water under Parks jurisdiction,” wrote a spokesperson for the division in an e-mail to Scientific American. The spokesperson added that the relevant rule is Part 1-04(b)(1)(iii), which prohibits disturbing vegetation.

Demchak’s rule of thumb is that “if you could fish with a fishing pole, for the most part, you can magnet fish.” Sure historic websites, nonetheless, will be off-limits to magnet fishers. In actual fact, fearing the destruction of delicate submerged artifacts, South Carolina has outlawed magnet fishing below the state’s Underwater Antiquities Act. It’s the one U.S. state to have made the interest unlawful in public areas.

If you happen to ever determine to toss a magnet right into a lake (the place authorized), Kane and Agostini provide just a few pointers: Be up-to-date in your tetanus pictures. Deliver a primary support equipment for scrapes and pokes and a big bucket for the rubbish you’ll inevitably discover. Eliminate that junk correctly or promote it to a scrapyard. Put on thick, protecting gloves and garments you don’t thoughts getting muddy. And look out for the click on—the haptic sensation that travels up a rope when a magnet has caught to one thing exhausting and hole, corresponding to a protected. It’ll most likely be trash, however then once more, you received’t know till you pull it out of the water. “We still get excited,” Agostini says, “because it’s a mystery every time.”