Season 12 in brief
A new drilling program targets the Golden Egg, the underground zone where Dr. Fred Michel believes gold and silver concentrations are highest. The team deploys seven-foot caissons with partner Soletanche Bachy Canada, but when shaft TB1 collapses into a massive underground void, the setback reveals something unexpected: the solution channel, a natural geological feature running deep beneath the Money Pit where original depositors may have hidden their treasure. The discovery reframes the entire search. Three caissons are sunk around the former Shaft 6, producing old wood, iron, and leather from depths exceeding 150 feet. In Malta, Rick Lagina, Alex Lagina, Peter Fornetti, and Corjan Mol investigate the fortifications built by the Knights of Malta, where archaeologist Matthew Balzan identifies a pickaxe from 145 feet below Oak Island as a baqqun, a standard quarrying tool. Underground tunnels beneath Valletta reveal blue-gray clay waterproofing identical to material found in the Money Pit. At the Cittadella prison on Gozo, the team discovers four-dot crosses and symbols matching the 90-foot stone, and Corjan traces the de Villiers bloodline from 12th-century Jerusalem through the Templars and Hospitallers to Isaac de Razilly, a Knight of Malta who established the French colony of Acadia, now Nova Scotia, in 1632. The season culminates with TOT1, "The One Thing," reaching 195 feet before airlifting material from the solution channel at 300 pounds per square inch, recovering artifacts from deeper than anyone has reached before.
