The possibility that the Titanic caught the Titan submersible during its immersion has been on the table of the coast guard since the moment of its disappearance. Far from the photograph printed in the popular imagination about the most famous shipwreck in history, the remains of the ocean liner that astonished the world due to its size and theoretical resistance do not rest like a ghostly silhouette on a clean background. On its descent into the depths, the ship ruptured, split into two large segments, the decks crushed one on top of the other like playing cards from a deck of cards, and an enormous amount of pieces were scattered around it in an area of four square kilometers.
Pilots with extensive knowledge about the Titanic ensure that the complication of navigating in this swarm of metal is high. A Coast Guard spokesman took it for granted on Tuesday that one of the worst scenarios would be that the Titan would have been left out of control due to an electrical failure and at the mercy of currents that would have thrown it into the debris field until it was hooked to some piece of the ship. .
The submersible is small, hermetic, built with carbon and is operated with a kind of simple ‘joistick’, according to the description of David Pogue, a CBS correspondent who last year descended in search of the mysteries of the Titanic in the same device. now gone. He didn’t make it. Bad weather and total darkness at a depth of 3,800 meters prevented the expedition from finding the great ship. “There’s no GPS underwater, so the surface ship is supposed to guide the sub to the wreck by sending text messages,” Pogue explained of how things work down there. A Canadian coast guard official also explained that the bed where the wreck rests is “the size of Connecticut.”
The Titanic debuted as the world’s largest passenger ship 111 years ago. And the safest. Her strong hull and her bulkhead system were considered to make her unsinkable. But she didn’t make it past her maiden voyage. Between the night of April 14, 1912 and the following morning, she sank when she hit an iceberg in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, 600 kilometers from Newfoundland. She had departed from Southampton, in the United Kingdom, and was due to arrive in New York (United States) with more than 2,000 passengers on board. More than 1,500 went down with the ship.
the mysterious mound
It can be assumed that the fall to the bottom of the huge ocean liner consisted of a progressive demolition exercise. The remains of the structure deposited around it point in that direction. The impact with the bottom must have been equally colossal. Rest in two pieces. The bow and stern are separated, 800 meters from each other, south of the Great Bank of Newfoundland. The site is known as the Titanic Canyon, as geologist Alan Ruffmann called it in 1991, six years after the wreck was discovered.
As an anecdote, there remains a curious mystery that has intrigued until recently more than one marine geologist and archaeologist. After the discovery of the Titanic, a huge longitudinal mound was detected in 1996 a short distance from the wreck. Such a formation has given rise to all kinds of speculation for decades: from the fact that it was a singular unknown geological construction to the remains of another ship buried in the seabed. It was not until a couple of years ago that a scientific expedition was able to confirm that the structure is made up of a cluster of basaltic rocks under whose shelter a varied marine ecosystem has grown. Farewell to the legend of the cemetery of sunken ships. The result was released by OceanGate, the same company that owns the missing Titan submersible.
Robert Ballard and Jean-Michel Louis are responsible for the discovery of the wreck and also for the decision to leave it at the bottom of the ocean to preserve the grave of its 1,500 deceased. Ballard is an individual who belongs in American naval history. A scientist and US Navy officer, in the 1980s and 1990s he located the wreckage of the battleship Bismarck and the aircraft carrier USS Yorktown. And before the Titanic rescued the remains of the Thresher and Scorpion nuclear submarines, sunk during the Cold War in those Atlantic waters that preserve the ghosts of the sea.
It was precisely this experience that allowed him to find the whereabouts of the famous ocean liner. The chronicles of the time tell how the two submarines had burst due to the pressure of the water while they were sinking and thousands of pieces were thrown in all directions. Ballard only had to follow the rest of that debris to find the submersibles.
He applied the same idea to the Titanic, which he had already tried to find in 1975 during an expedition that failed due to lack of resources. The archaeologist knew that the great ship also imploded during her sinking, so there must have been numerous pieces at the bottom making a magnificent trace. With the help of the Argo, a submersible robot, Ballard and Louis scoured the seabed. The device first discovered several holes in the bottom, the product of dozens of metal shrapnel impacts; then the first pieces of the Titanic appeared, and later her broken hull. The wreck was already home to an enormous marine ecosystem and some schools of fish whose slight sound when swimming among the remains aroused the fantasies of those who thought they were mysterious signals sent from the command bridge years later.
Life hasn’t been easy for the ship down there in the dark either. The mystique of the Titanic has multiplied exploratory missions and tourist trips to the place where she lies. This kind of high-level ‘Sunday’ expeditions has damaged some of the decks due to the impacts of the submersibles. The interior has also been looted. And, as it happens in Everest, but in this case in the underwater bed, there is an abundance of rubbish, waste and pieces lost by the ships that visit the area. It must be hard for a researcher to travel to those depths to find a plastic cup. There are hundreds.
The bacteria that eats metal
The future of the Titanic is its complete disappearance and, for this reason, many specialists consider that the rage to visit it has intensified. No matter the price, as revealed by the high level of passengers who occupy the ‘Titan’. The ship is already facing its last trip to decrepitude. In half a century it will have been turned into a vestige. The threats are various. Less than three kilometers away is a vast expanse of mud and sediment that the currents drag inexorably towards the wreck and that will end up burying it. But before she will be devoured by microorganisms,
A bacterium, called Halomonos Titanicae at the time, has developed at these depths to colonize the Titanic along with large colonies of fungi. The microorganism oxidizes iron to keep its metabolism active and survive in such an adverse environment where it needs huge doses of energy. It is possible to discover it with the naked eye. There are images that show huge rusty bumps on the railings and other parts of the ship that have been formed by the bacteria, capable of consuming 50 kilos of metal a day. At this rate, the pressure will most likely successively crush the ocean liner’s superstructure as its plates thin out until it is transformed into an unrecognizable heap of iron from which only myth will be saved.
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