Question

Passage A
The 2001 UNESCO Convention on the Protection of the Underwater Cultural Heritage formally codified in situ preservation—the practice of leaving submerged archaeological artifacts undisturbed on the seabed—as the first and preferred management paradigm. Proponents of this preservationist doctrine maintain that deep-water marine environments, particularly cold, dark, and hypoxic benthic zones, offer exceptionally stable chemical and physical conditions that retard organic decay and corrosion far more effectively than conventional terrestrial conservation facilities, which often struggle to prevent the rapid degradation of waterlogged materials. Beyond these physicochemical virtues, advocates emphasize that physical excavation is intrinsically destructive. Once an archaeological stratum is disturbed and artifacts are raised to the surface, the intricate spatial and contextual relationships among the remains—relationships that yield vital historical insights into shipboard hierarchies, cargo organization, and naval architecture—are permanently severed.

Moreover, proponents assert that technological advancements in non-invasive survey methods have fundamentally altered the necessity of physical artifact recovery. Autonomous underwater vehicles and submersibles equipped with synthetic aperture sonar, laser line scanners, and high-resolution photogrammetric arrays can now construct millimetric three-dimensional digital reconstructions of shipwreck sites without dislodging a single timber. Such non-destructive remote sensing allows scholars to extract extensive structural and spatial data while preserving the physical site intact for future generations of archaeologists, whose analytical techniques will inevitably surpass present capabilities.

Passage B
While the preservationist premise that underwater sites are safest when left undisturbed holds theoretical appeal in pristine marine sanctuaries, it increasingly collapses when confronted with the realities of modern deep-water industrialization. Over the past three decades, the rapid expansion of commercial bottom-trawling fisheries, benthic polymetallic nodule mining, and submarine pipeline and telecommunications infrastructure has introduced unprecedented anthropogenic destruction to abyssal plains previously insulated from human activity. In regions slated for intensive seafloor exploitation, dogmatically adhering to in situ preservation does not safeguard underwater cultural heritage; rather, it passively consigns vulnerable historical sites to unmonitored mechanical obliteration.

Under such pressing conditions, pragmatic maritime stewardship demands prioritized, selective physical recovery. Although full-scale excavation is undeniably resource-intensive and disturbs spatial context, controlled artifact extraction under targeted rescue protocols secures irreplaceable material culture, diagnostic ceramic typologies, and epigraphic evidence that would otherwise be pulverized. Non-invasive digital imaging, while valuable as a preliminary surveying tool, cannot substitute for the detailed metallurgical, isotopic, and dendrochronological laboratory analyses that require tangible physical samples. When maritime sites face imminent commercial destruction, total non-intervention ceases to be an act of ethical conservation; it becomes an abdication of archaeological responsibility. In situ preservation must therefore be recognized not as an absolute mandate, but as an ideal contingent upon the absence of acute anthropogenic threats.

Based on the passages, the authors of Passage A and Passage B would be most likely to agree on which one of the following statements?