1 MIN AGO: Emma Culligan’s NEW Analysis REVEALS an Oak Island Artifact’s TRUE Purpose!

Pirates, privateers, Captain Kidd. There’s this belief that treasure was deposited there.
Okay, we’re at 96 with the dig. So, what’s this wood telling us?

Gold inside a piece of old Oak Island wood. Real gold. And Emma Culligan demonstrated it with a machine so sensitive it detected traces no one else had.

For years, this artifact remained unknown—until Emma’s test revealed a hidden story no one saw coming.
Tune in, because her next scan has just detected another object.
What everyone missed, until Emma showed up.

Emma never planned on ending up in the middle of all this.
She studied engineering and archaeology at a university in Newfoundland.
During one of her classes, a professor noticed she stood out.
Not many students mixed those two worlds—and fewer still could handle chemistry like she did.

That professor pulled her into a research project, and soon Emma was knee-deep in metal samples, using a heavy-duty electron microscope to look at iron in ways most people never think about.

That was back in 2014.
She had no idea that one of those samples would change her entire work.

A couple years later, Emma’s résumé landed in the right hands.
A woman working with the Oak Island project passed it along, and it made its way to someone who knew what to do with it.

At the time, the island needed someone who could run complex machines that test the surface of artifacts.
Emma fit the bill.
She was close by, knew how to handle metal analysis, and wasn’t afraid of digging into old junk for answers.

“More wood, Rick.”
“My gut feeling.”
“And your gut feeling says this is some kind of old tunnel.”

Once she was brought in, the pace picked up.
Her job now looks a lot like detective work—but for objects nobody understands.

Using machines that shoot X-rays into old metal or wood, she figures out what’s buried inside without having to break the piece open.
These machines aren’t sitting in every school lab either.
They’re expensive and rare, and now Oak Island has them on hand year-round.

Then Emma found something that changed everything.
A lab.
A scan.
A shock.

Emma doesn’t just run scans—she explains what those scans mean.
And that’s where the details get interesting.

One day, she tested a chunk of wood pulled from the island.
Nothing fancy looking. Just a piece of old timber.
But inside, the machine picked up traces of gold.

Not flakes you could see. Not specks.
We’re talking about 11-hundredths of a percent.

That’s 0.11% gold to most people. That sounds tiny.
To someone in her field, it’s enough to get the whole crew moving.

She didn’t believe it at first. Checked again. Triple-checked. Then called the producers.
Ten minutes later, they were heading out to the dig site. It was that quick.

Gold doesn’t just show up in wood for no reason.
There are a few ways it can happen, but none of them are boring.

One theory is that trees soak up minerals from the ground—kind of like filters.
Scientists have even found gold in the leaves of trees.
I mean, a circular depression was found underneath a giant oak tree.

But this wasn’t a leaf. This was a heavy chunk taken from a spot where something big had been happening.

Now, Emma couldn’t say if that gold was refined or not. The particles were too small.
That kind of analysis takes another set of machines—and another kind of lab.

What she could say was simple: the gold was real.
It was there.
And it was enough to matter.

This all came out of a lab that’s grown fast.
It started as a small space with a couple machines.
Now it’s a 12-month operation.

They’ve got a new building, more gear, and people sending in artifacts from far beyond Nova Scotia.
The lab’s becoming a place where archaeologists can send their hardest cases.

Tools there include scanners, readers, and other high-end equipment most places can’t afford.
Emma’s tests are surface level, which means they don’t cut into the artifact.
They read the outer layer.

That makes her results a little different from deeper tests.
Depending on what the material is—iron, copper, or wood—the readings can change.

Move the scanner just one tiny step and the results could shift.
That’s why she doesn’t deal in parts per billion or parts per million.
Her numbers come in weight percent, which means how much of the surface is made up of a certain element.

That gold reading—the 0.11%—showed up on her scale as small but solid.
Still enough to call in the team.

And it’s not just gold that comes across her desk.
Most days, it’s nails, wires, bits of old tools.
Sometimes they send in weird pieces just to see what she’ll do.

One time someone brought in a corn kernel they thought might be historic.
Turned out a camera crew had been eating corn nuts and spitting them into the dig hole.
The kernel wasn’t from the past. It was from lunch.

Other times, she gets stuff from long-forgotten digs—like steel wire from the 1800s or roofing tiles found on beaches.
Each piece gets tested, logged, and added to the bigger picture.

The team wants to know not just what these things are, but where they came from—and why they matter.

The lab is also moving toward doing its own conservation.
That means cleaning, restoring, and preserving items so they can last longer and be studied more closely.

The woman running all this came in through the back door.
Emma started out just hoping to help the archaeology crew in the summer.
Her first job offer came in an email she thought was fake.
She almost deleted it.

Now she’s in the middle of a growing research center, helping uncover clues that lead to stories buried deeper than most people realize.

The people around her have noticed.
One archaeologist who saw her résumé remembered she had studied Portuguese nails and looked for traces of gold in them.
That kind of background made her perfect for this kind of work.

She lived close. Knew her metals. Had years of hands-on experience with the kind of tests the island needed.
Now, when something new comes in, she might be the first person to touch it.

“Yeah, these timbers look really old.”
Yeah, her job isn’t just to scan the object, but to decide what kind of test it needs, how deep to go, and how to read the results.

It’s careful work, and there’s no room for wild guesses.
One wrong move could damage the piece.
One wrong reading could send the team looking in the wrong direction.

But finding gold was just the beginning.

When false leads still matter, you ever wonder what really happens when folks dig around in old dirt hoping to find something more than just rocks?
It’s not treasure maps and secret tunnels.

It’s more like bags of soil, rusty metal, and lab work that runs through the night.

One guy brought in river gold once.
Just a small bit he panned himself.
Handed it over like it was candy.
Got tested, bagged, and stored.
That’s how things go.

No spotlight. Just steady hands and curious minds.

Some folks walk into the lab holding metal bits they found on the ground.
Coins, scrap, even a piece of a gate once.
It’s all dirt-covered and beat up, but it gets the same treatment.

Run the metal through machines. Scan the dirt. Scrape off corrosion.
You never know what tiny detail will tell a big story.

One time they found beeswax stuck to a piece of iron.
That beeswax meant someone took care of it, cleaned it, maybe used it a lot.
Back then, beeswax wasn’t cheap.
If it’s there, it’s a clue.

People watching the show once thought the whole archaeology team got canned.
But that never happened.
One went back to school. Another had other work.
Still, people got worked up.

They only saw the part the camera showed.
Not the day-to-day.
Not the mud, the paperwork, the hours staring at screens.

On camera, it’s drama.
Off camera, it’s data.

They even studied how much cabbage could be grown on a plot of land.
Not kidding.
Figured out the size of the fields, the yield, and how much sauerkraut that could make.
They mapped it all out.

Why?
Because knowing what was grown tells you about the people who lived there.
If it was cabbage, that’s one thing.
If it was tobacco, that’s something else.

Details matter.

In the lab, the machines do different jobs.
One checks minerals.
Another checks what kind of metal’s inside.
One digs deep into the structure.

They work together like puzzle pieces.
You want to know if a coin is real copper? Run it through.
Want to know if a nail came from a ship or a fence? That’s another scan.

You don’t pick favorites.
Each machine brings something different to the table.

One researcher collected over 200 coins from a small museum.
Some had square holes punched through them.
Some were gold. Others were almost too far gone.
But every single one got scanned.

Not because they were all special—but because every piece added something to the collection.

A few turned out to be from places