Regina scientist Lori Johnston-hill takes to the depths to photograph and visit the famous wreck.
Exploring shipwreck is personal
She’s curled into something of a fetal position in a cramped belly of metal and mechanics.
Two more adult bodies make the two metres of space feel even tighter. Thoughts of claustrophobia and all the things that could go wrong are forced aside; this is no time to panic.
Lori Johnston-hill must hold that posture for the next 12 to 15 hours. The freefall decent into the depths of the Atlantic continues for four kilometres — through murky light to utterly pitch darkness. So focused on the day’s objectives, practising manoeuvres, plotting the submersible’s location, and communicating with the companion sub, the two-anda-half hour journey passes in a flash for Johnston-hill.
The destination is a deteriorating metal graveyard, one with a serene, biological allure that captivates the Regina microbiologist.
Of course, she had heard plenty about the wreck, but Johnston-hill didn’t feel she truly knew the ill-fated RMS Titanic until her first submersible dive there in 2001. Four more would follow.
“When you go there, it has this draw. It ends up being personal — I’ve been a foot away from that handrail. And then there was this beautiful rusticle growth on it, and the experiments were here,” she says.
“How do you separate that from who stood there and who touched that rail last. Did they survive? Did they not survive? What were they feeling? How did they get there in the first place? All these other emotions run through it,” she admits.
“At the time, you’re not conscientiously thinking about that. It took a long time to process — because you’re minutes here, you’re minutes there. You do this whole bow section say in 10 hours. And to process all of that takes so much time afterwards.”
Images of the iconic ship recreated in the 1997 blockbuster Hollywood movie gave way to reality, visible in the light cast by the sub.
“The stern is a mass of twisted metal and wires. It doesn’t really look like a ship,” says Johnston-hill.
The bow — 600 metres away — looks as though parked in the sand, appearing very much intact.
“When we came up on it, we came directly up onto the stem — the tip of the bow. And it’s two-thirds buried into the sand, and it’s absolutely huge. My first thought was, this is ginormous. You see pictures, but it’s really hard to (grasp), unless you’re sort of standing beside it, if you will.”
Despite the deterioration, that part of Titanic still resembles the luxury liner it was before its devastating impact with an iceberg on April 14 a century ago.
Through the eyes of mini, camera-carrying robots known as Jake and Elwood that extensively probed the interior of the wreck for the first time, Johnston-hill saw images that are etched in her memory. They capture an inexplicable blurring of the lines between chaos and calm.
Entire walls are gone, but for a strip of wood — the remnants of a door still bearing its handle and lock. “It would be almost suspended in the doorjam, and yet the walls around it would be gone. And yet other areas would be hallways and some doors were open, and you’d go in.
“There was one room that they had gone into, and the bed was perfectly in place with two night tables and a lamp still plugged in. You could see the plug in the wall,” she marvels. “The bedspread didn’t have a wrinkle. It was completely made … It was covered in growth, but it wasn’t like (it went) through this huge disaster of striking an iceberg and being torn in two and plunging four kilometres below the surface. And you think, how can that be? And yet it is.”
Crystal glasses and the decanter are still upright. In the physician’s area, the desk was as he would have left it. “There’s files in the file folders. Ink wells, and all his medications are on the walls in little cupboards.
“And yet other rooms are complete disasters. It’s just jumbled — broken sinks, and a hat or a trunk or — it’s a variety of destruction and chaos.
“And you’d go down one hallway over — and there would be nothing.”
In the words of JohnstonHill, the experience left a mark on her soul.
The deep sea researcher recounts her expeditions as she sits firmly ensconced in this landlocked province that is the former Vancouverite’s home.
Even she marvels at an unlikely career path that has allowed her to gaze firsthand upon renowned shipwrecks at some of the deepest ocean depths and be a part of moviemaking — while conducting scientific studies.
After graduating from the University of Regina in 1997 with her Bachelor of Science degree, Johnston-hill was waiting to get accepted to study veterinary medicine when she took a job with Dr. Roy Cullimore, a microbial ecologist and one of her former U of R professors. Cullimore, founder of Regina-based environmental consulting company Droycon Bioconcepts, is a leading expert studying the degradation of Titanic and other wrecks.
Johnston-hill’s work for Cullimore became a careerchanger.
“I kind of got wound up in the whole microbiology and different tests and experiments we were doing,” Johnston-hill recalls. In 1998 Cullimore was invited on an expedition and asked her to come along to assist with his experiments on the “rusticles” — “rusty icicles” — the bacteria feasting on Titanic.
The biological concrete hangs from the ship giving it an eerie beauty with its range of colours from brown and orange to green, blue, and purple.
“It was a once in a lifetime opportunity.” Or so she thought. In reality, it was only the start of their microbiological studies on ocean wrecks. Despite leaving Droycon after 11 years for a new job, Johnston-hill continued with the research often arranged by the company as opportunities arose.
“It’s a very small group of people that do the deep ocean science, so once you get involved with them, they learn what you’re doing and you learn what they’re doing, and find different ways to co-operate and complement each other,” she says.
“It just sort of snowballed with Titanic — as well as a number of other wrecks.” During that 1998 trip, she never had the opportunity to actually get down to the Titanic — but she would do two dives in 2001, two in 2003 and one in 2005.
The year 2002 would feature a dive to the Bismarck, a German battleship sunk in 1941 off the coast of France and one of the deepest wrecks to be explored biologically.
The emotional experience was a stark contrast to the Titanic dives.
“Bismarck was scary. Bismarck was war. Bismarck has just a dark, foreboding feeling,” she says, describing the visible fire damage and swastika markings.
“Whereas, Titanic almost has — it’s a melancholy, but almost a dreamlike feeling to it.”
In trying to build a library of scientific findings, she’s also made dives to a number shipwrecks in the Gulf of Mexico, examining wood as well as steel vessels, including several of Second World War vintage, and to Titanic’s sister ship the Brittanic which went down in 1916.
Make no mistake, they’re not vacations.
“You’re 500 miles out to sea, you’re completely engulfed in this expedition. You don’t get outside news ... You live and breathe this expedition.”
Johnston-hill admits she’s lost count of the trips she’s made to the wrecks. “Ask my husband,” she adds with a chuckle.
“I think it was the first five years of marriage, I never made his birthday, which is in June, and I usually didn’t make our anniversary.”
Added to the mix is her full-time job in research and development at Ground Effects Environmental — what she calls her “real professional life”— and being mom to two active boys James, 5, and Zack, 3. She also squeezed in a master’s degree, largely done via the Internet, from Royal Roads University.
While many working moms worry about arranging busy lives to go on business trips for days at a time, Johnston-hill can be gone for months. And there’s often a lot of uncertainty with the timing and length. In 2010 after months of planning, hurricanes scuttled a two-week research trip to Titanic two days before she and Sean Frisky — owner of Regina-based Ground Effects Environmental — were due to leave.
She credits the support of her employers, friends and her husband Chris, an engineer, for helping to make the juggling act work. “It’s a lot of organization,” she says, of course, mindful that the best laid plans can to awry.
“I always leave and have these visions of Lord of the Flies and I’m going to come back and he’s going to be tied up in the basement and the kids are going to have the rule of the house,” she laughs.
Nothing nearly so dramatic has occurred, but James, who started school this year, has a better handle on the remarkable nature of his mom’s work after she went in one day to speak to his kindergarten class about Titanic and conduct some simple experiments with the students. “Now he asks me, every time I’m leaving, ‘Are you going to a boat?’”
He’s also not above bragging about his mom’s exploits — but she wonders if those unfamiliar with her work think he’s telling tales.
You have to admit, she’s probably the only mom in Regina who could call up Hollywood moviemaker James Cameron — or “Jim” as Johnston-hill refers to him — and have him actually take her call.
For Cameron, the 2001 expedition to Titanic was to film Ghosts of the Abyss, a 3-D documentary about the sinking released in 2003. It’s narrated by movie star Bill Paxton, who was also on the expedition that started in August and stretched to October because of time needed for filming.
Johnston-hill appears in it, describing the experimental tests conducted by her and Cullimore (after whom Cameron modelled the character Dr. Max Patel in Avatar.)
So how do scientists end up aboard a ship with a Hollywood film crew?
Few agencies, particularly in tough economic times, have the millions of dollars in funding it takes for deep ocean science. “So a lot of times you count on Discovery Channel, National Geographic, Nova, Channel 4 in the UK, History Channel to do the majority of the funding,” explains JohnstonHill. In particular, there’s only about five submersibles worldwide capable of safely reaching deep wrecks. “So they’re not only in demand, they’re not cheap,” she says. “It always multi-faceted expeditions, and we are sort of the tagalong.”
Of Cameron, she says, “I respect him greatly. I think he is a brilliant scientist, an engineer. He understands it. He has the compassion and the passion for what we do.”
Still, she admits that during the 2001 expedition, she wasn’t really prepared for “full-on Hollywood.” She had no idea of the time or detail required for filming. Paxton, the movie’s narrator, came aboard the Russian research vessel with his makeup and hair person.
“I go to sea, I go to work. You’re dirty, you’re hot, you’re sweaty, you’re cold, you’re wet. It’s not a pretty place.”
Movie-making aside, she’s very clear about her role: “The reason I’m there is for the science.”
The work carries inherent risks as Johnston-hill knows only too well having lost three close friends — members of a sort of “surrogate family” forged on expeditions. One was killed in a diving accident as he conducted experiments on Britannic in 2008.
Scientists long thought the ocean at the depths of wrecks like Titanic and Brittanic were sterile places. But much of that thinking has changed because of the work of Cullimore and Johnston-hill. Their focus has been the deterioration of the wrecks because of the biological processes taking place there.
“That’s a very important aspect that we know very little about,” says JohnstonHill.
“It’s very good information to have, particularly when you’re building pipelines across vast amounts of ocean. Any steal structure is going to rust and corrode and deteriorate, so the more information that we have ... really helps us determine what the lifespan of these are.”
The deep ship wrecks are critical to that study because the rusticles end up being almost a “pure form” of deterioration and corrosion. “There’s little else that can compete for the amount of the rusticle growth on the ship.” She explains that usually barnacles and other matters, where there’s light penetrating, can out-compete the rusticles. “So this is a very pure and almost a virgin site that has been untouched.”
Conducting experiments at those depths are not simple, requiring ingenuity to find or put together equipment that will withstand time and the crushing water pressure at 6,000 pounds per square inch — and, more importantly, not become a risk for the submersible to take down. Trapped air in some device could cause an implosion. Some of the experiments are short-term while others will sit for five to 10 years.
“We don’t touch the ship,” she adds. “We are completely non-invasive. We don’t take anything; we don’t touch anything as far as artifacts or the ship itself ... We have devised various ways of trying to be as gentle as possible when recovering rusticles. And that’s all,” she says.
“It’s a gravesite that deserves to be respected, so we strongly discourage even touching down on the ground.”
With each subsequent dive to Titanic, she’s noticed the evolution in the degradation — and it’s proceeding exponentially. “The rusticles seem to have a bit of a lifecycle to them. As they deteriorate, break off, and you have these spent rusticles. But those become almost seed for the next growth. As they continue to spread, so does the rate of deterioration continue to grow.
“The world will not come to an end when Titanic is spot of iron on the floor,” she adds.
As a scientist, JohnstonHill’s focus has been the minute details, the microbes living from the death of Titanic. But she can’t help pulling back from the microscope at times.
“Even in 1912, how can that happen?” she asks. “When you get out there, there’s nothing. You’re 500 miles from nothing. You don’t see anyone, you don’t hear anything. There’s no boats around. There’s no other people around.
“You feel really how small you are in the great scheme of things.”