Posted on 08/12/2003 7:48:46 AM PDT by lainie
he Titanic, assailed by rust as well as by hundreds of explorers and moviemakers, salvors and tourists (including a couple who were married in a miniature submarine on its bow), is rapidly falling apart.
The world's most famous shipwreck was found in 1985 resting on the North Atlantic seabed more than two miles down, upright but split in two. Its discoverers pronounced it in a fair state of preservation after more than 73 years in icy darkness and estimated that the wreck would change little in their lifetimes.
But it has the weakest of legal protections to fend off humans who are loving it to death, and no protections at all against rust, corrosive salts and microbes on the hulk.
Divers who have visited the Titanic in the past decade report that its disintegration is accelerating. The crow's nest, where a lookout warned, "Iceberg right ahead!" has vanished. The forward mast has crumpled. The captain's cabin, where he was resting when the ship struck the iceberg, has collapsed, as has the poop deck where passengers gathered as the liner sank.
Gaping holes have opened up in the Titanic's decks, metal walls have slumped and rivers of rust known as rusticles, which look like brownish icicles hanging from the ship's iron plates, have multiplied so fast that in some places they cover the hull.
"I was shocked," said Alfred S. McLaren, an ocean scientist and retired submariner who dived onto the wreck in 1999 and again last month. "It's much more heavily deteriorated. I expected her to be in about the same shape as 1999. But, God almighty, there's more rusticles everywhere."
Paul H. Nargeolet, a French minisub pilot who has explored the wreck more than 30 times, said each dive revealed new damage.
"Things are going quicker and quicker," he said. Between visits, Mr. Nargeolet observed, the roof of the gymnasium had collapsed and a big hole had opened up on the boat deck, where some of the Titanic's women and children climbed into lifeboats and were lowered to safety.
The United States has grown interested in the Titanic's fate and is talking with France, Britain and Canada about how to preserve what remains of history's most famous luxury liner. In June, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration sent six scientists down to survey the wreck and start assessing its condition and its future.
Scientists and maritime experts say the worsening decay is caused by natural forces like the corrosive effect of salt water as well as human activity, which has increased markedly over the years despite the pleas of Titanic societies to respect the wreck as a grave site.
Perhaps the most surprising theory, advanced by Dr. McLaren, is that the overfishing of the Grand Banks, close to where the Titanic sank, has produced an explosion in tiny marine life that is normally eaten but now falls steadily, like a never-ending snow, speeding up the ship's rusting.
"The snow feeds the rusticles, and they become more active and extract more iron from the ship," said D. Roy Cullimore, a Canadian microbiologist who has visited the wreck three times, most recently in June.
People are also taking a heavy toll, the visitors say. The surrounding site is littered with beer and soda bottles, pieces of line, weights, chains and cargo nets —mostly from salvage efforts, which have focused on the ship's extensive debris fields.
Visitors to the wreck, descending in the miniature deep-sea submarines known as submersibles, which usually hold three people, have littered some of the ship's most prominent areas with nearly a dozen plaques and memorials, including artificial flowers.
In 1996 divers found wreckage from a submersible accident scattered on a Titanic deck. They hauled up a half dozen pieces.
Tourists have paid up to $36,000 a dive. In July 2001, a New York couple, David Leibowitz and Kimberley Miller, were married in a submersible resting on the Titanic's bow. (A ship's captain officiated from the surface, speaking to the couple through a hydrophone.)
"Visitors do more damage than anybody else," said Ed Kamuda, president of the Titanic Historical Society, in Springfield, Mass., a nonprofit information clearinghouse, which advocates preservation. "The thing is going to deteriorate anyway, but it doesn't help when you've got all these subs going by, disturbing the sediment and whatnot."
Salvors, who since 1987 have recovered thousands of artifacts, have long argued that the wreck's inevitable decay made their work important, even as critics questioned their integrity and thoroughness. Now the accelerated damage seems likely to bolster their arguments.
Emory Kristof, an undersea photographer for National Geographic magazine who went on the discovery voyage in 1985 and dived on the Titanic in 1991 to help make a movie, said recovery efforts were helping save the ship for posterity.
"Gathering up material from the ship and putting it on display, I find nothing wrong with that," he said. "It helps preserve a great legend of the 20th century."
The tragedy began on the frigid night of April 14, 1912, when the Titanic — the largest and most luxurious ship afloat, a symbol of the Edwardian era aglitter with pearls and mahogany, socialites and industrialists — hit an iceberg and sank on its inaugural voyage from Southampton, England, to New York. More than 1,500 people died.
A French-American team found the wreck in international waters 380 miles off Newfoundland in 1985, the bow and stern half a mile apart. Strewn in between were a field of wine bottles and fine china, shoes and spittoons. The discoverers found no bodies or bones.
Robert D. Ballard, a leader of the mission, at first called for the recovery of some artifacts but later argued that the site should be left alone as a memorial. In his 1987 book, "The Discovery of the Titanic," he wrote that the wreck, if unmolested by treasure hunters, "won't appear to change much in my lifetime."
Nearly a decade later, worried about deterioration, the wreck's salvors, R. M. S. Titanic Inc. of Atlanta, hired Dr. Cullimore, the Canadian microbiologist, to help assess the ship's condition. During a 1996 dive and expedition, he discovered that its rivers of rust were populated by microbes and estimated that each day they removed 200 pounds of iron from the ship's bow.
Two years later, after Dr. Cullimore dived to the wreck again, he found that the biological activity had intensified, and estimated that the microbes were removing 600 pounds of iron a day.
In April 2001, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration issued guidelines for research, exploration and salvage of the Titanic.
The agency said it expected that the hull and structure of the ship would "collapse to the ocean floor within the next 50 years, perhaps sooner." The aim of the guidelines, the agency added, "is to discourage activities that would accelerate the ship's deterioration."
For instance, the guidelines call for no holes to be cut in the ship's hull. The guidelines are just advisory, however, and are not legally enforceable.
Late in the summer of 2001, James Cameron, director of the movie "Titanic," sailed to the site to film "Ghosts of the Abyss," an IMAX movie that opened last April.
"Time was of the essence because Titanic is collapsing," the filmmakers said in a news release, adding that scientists estimated that sections of the wreck would "collapse sometime within the next 20 to 30 years."
Last year the climate of uncertainty grew as pirates lowered a robot down to the wreck, working without permission of the legal salvors.
"They were trying to recover some artifacts," said Mr. Nargeolet, the French submersible pilot. "They dove on the bow section and tried to recover the pedestal of the wheel, the only thing left in the middle of the bridge. I heard that people saw a lot of damage."
This June, using twin Russian submersibles, the federal oceans agency dived to the wreck, taking two microbiologists (including Dr. Cullimore), two archaeologists and two agency shipwreck experts.
Larry E. Murphy, an archaeologist for the National Park Service who went on the expedition, said it was done to determine how to measure multiple processes of decay and come up with a credible estimate of the rate of deterioration.
"The sad thing," he said, "is that with all the gathering of artifacts, there's still not a reliable map that's been done and we know very little about what's going on with the site. We have anecdotal observations, but very little science."
He said the federal team made a photographic mosaic of the wreck for the first time since its 1985 discovery. "Now," he added, "we have a basis for comparison."
In July private experts, including Dr. McLaren, an emeritus president of the Explorers Club in New York, used the Russian submersibles to explore the Titanic's state of decay.
David A. Bright, a team member, compared the expedition's own photographs with those of earlier explorations. He found walls collapsing, structures rotting away, joints widening, tears developing in hull plates and rusticles growing vibrantly.
The Titanic, Dr. McLaren and Mr. Bright concluded, "has been losing its structural integrity at a rapid rate, and she is in danger of collapsing."
Most surprising because it doesn't blame people, and does not support our editorial theory.
Were they pieces of the submersible in question? I don't remember hearing about this... unless someone went down in secret... oops
The Titanic movie film crew hired a Russian crew to take them to the site to get footage for the movie. Apparently they were trying to get places no one else had ever been, for more dramatic footage, when an accident occurred that damaged both the submarine AND the Titanic. There are a lot of people apparently trying to keep this hush-hush. When the R.M.S. Titanic Salvage crew arrived on scene (this was in 1996 and they had to wait for the film crew to leave even though they own the salvage rights), they found many submarine parts lying on the Titanic and were easily able to put two and two together. There are A LOT of people extrememly upset over this and the carelessness of the movie crew.
Nature is reclaiming her own. Why are these folks crying?
Sheesh! No kidding! That's what's funny about this whole story.
The Titanic is sitting under two miles of salt water. It will eventually rust itself into dust. It's not Mt. Everest. It ain't gonna be there forever.
These people need to learn to deal with it.
I realize this was a terrible tragedy, but there is something funny about that sentence.
The "explorers" that virtually worship the wreck - people who read the books, watch the movies and make certain all the pop-corn's popped before drooling over the latest "Titanic Documentary" on the Discovery Channel freak me out: it's all indicative of some mental problem I don't understand.
The Titanic is no where near as interesting as ships like the Bismarck: at least there's human drama and strife involved there. And while the sinking of a ship during war isn't "Romantic" in any sense, it's far more emotionally compelling than "Hey, watch out for the ice be.........."
I don't even know what that is. I guess modern ships don't have them.
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