Canadian officials say they have entered talks with the British government on how best to preserve the wreck of HMS Investigator, a 19th-century British naval ship that was found in Arctic waters this summer.

Archaeologists with Parks Canada discovered the shipwreck on July 25 in Banks Island's Mercy Bay in the Northwest Territories. The ship had been abandoned in 1854, during an attempt to search for Sir John Franklin's missing expedition.

The process of preserving HMS Investigator is still in the very early stages, said lead researcher Ryan Harris of Parks Canada.

"Looking at the timeline for an archaeological project, we're at the very infancy with HMS Investigator, which is at the stage of actually locating an archaeological site in the first place," Harris, a senior marine archaeologist, said earlier this week.

"We want to follow that up with a scuba-based assessment to determine what sort of condition the wreck is in."

Harris said his team hopes to conduct the scuba-related work as soon as possible.

Officials have said there are no plans to raise the shipwreck at this point.

An agreement worked out between Canada and Britain about the fate of HMS Investigator may be similar to an existing memorandum of understanding between the two countries about Franklin's lost ships, HMS Erebus and HMS Terror.

That agreement gives Canada the duty of managing and preserving the wreck sites -- assuming they are found -- while Britain would maintain ownership of the vessels.

Over the weekend, Harris's team had returned from a failed attempt to locate the Erebus and Terror near O'Reilly Island in Nunavut's Queen Maud Gulf.

In 1845, Franklin and his party set out from England aboard the vessels in hopes of exploring and mapping the Northwest Passage. Neither he nor any of his 128 crewmen returned.

The latest effort by Parks Canada to locate the Erebus and Terror was the second year of a three-year search for the two ships.

This story is posted on Alaska Dispatch as part of Eye on the Arctic, a collaborative partnership between public and private circumpolar media organizations.