The USS Arkansas was a Wyoming-class battleship commissioned in 1912, making her one of the oldest warships in the American fleet by the time she was brought to Bikini in 1946. She was positioned close to the underwater Baker detonation and was rolled and sunk almost immediately by the blast; she now lies inverted in around 33 metres of water, making her the shallowest of the major Bikini wrecks and one of the more accessible to divers who may not have deep-wreck specialties.
Her inverted profile creates an unusual diving environment. The flat expanse of her hull bottom forms a kind of ceiling over the dive; the propeller shafts extend downward from what is now the top of the wreck. Intact gun barrels — Arkansas carried twelve twelve-inch guns in paired turrets — project from the hull at angles dictated by the inversion. The shallow depth means more light penetrates than on the deeper wrecks, and the coral cover is correspondingly dense. Barrel sponges, sea fans, and hard coral colonies have colonised the hull extensively over eighty years.
The Arkansas is often dived in conjunction with the Saratoga, as the two wrecks are within reasonable tender distance of each other. Her shallower depth allows a longer bottom time and makes her a natural second dive in an afternoon or a productive night-dive destination.