Career
He is famous for locating the wrecks of several ships lost during World World War World War II In 2008, Mearns led a search team to find the Australian cruiser HMAS Sydney and the German auxiliary cruiser Kormoran, which both sank following a mutually destructive engagement off Western Australia in 1941. Prior to finding HMAS Sydney, Mearns said that it was, in some ways, "bigger than the Titanic" because of what it meant to Australia. "Nothing comes close to the Sydney."
At the end of 2010, he successfully led the search for another missing Australian shipwreck, the Hospital Ship Centaur, which was torpedoed off Queensland by a Japanese submarine in 1943.
He has been responsible for the discovery of 21 major shipwrecks, including:
the British Battlecruiser HMS Hood
Lucona, sunk in 1977 by a bomb planted by Udo Proksch, as part of an insurance fraud
Derbyshire, an ore-bulk-oil carrier which disappeared in 1980
Mearns also led the 2001 expedition to the ship that sank Hood, the German battleship Bismarck, which had been found by Robert Ballard and his team in 1989.
