Will the ship fade to black?
As nature devours the vessel, experts can’t agree on how to sustain its legacy
Celebrated, investigated and to some extent salvaged, the storied wreck of the “unsinkable” RMS Titanic rests nearly 2½ miles down on the muddy floor of the North Atlantic.
A tomb for some of the 1,500 men, women and children who died with the ship, a symbol of a grand, lost world to others, Titanic remains above all an enduring icon, a symbol of the limits of human genius against the raw force of nature.
But if the wreck is left untouched, nature will finish much of the job the iceberg started, in time dissolving much of the ship’s remains in the ocean elements, says University of Rhode Island explorer Robert Ballard, who co-led the team that discovered the ship’s resting place in 1985.
Now, as the 100th anniversary of the disaster April 15, 1912, approaches, U.S. officials and experts are pushing for decisions on what the future should be for the world’s most famous shipwreck. Should it be preserved? And if so, what’s the best way to ensure its legacy?
“Titanic is a wreck that the world cannot leave alone,” says archaeologist James Delgado, chief of the maritime heritage office at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). “We
can’t raise her, and we can’t keep her forever as it is now. But we can celebrate her and let her tell her story to future generations.”
In 1985, a team led by oceanographers Ballard, then with the Woods Hole (Mass.) Oceanographic Institute, and Jean-louis Michel of the French Ocean Institute discovered the shipwreck. They deployed sonar to track the field of debris left behind as the 882-foot-long liner sank, ripping in half on its descent. The discovery started a quarter-century of international negotiations, courtroom fights and moviemaking stardom for the ship. ( Titanic, the movie, gets a curtain call today when it’s re-released in 3-D.)
The find “launched the realization that the deep sea was the biggest museum on Earth,” Ballard says. “There’s probably more history in the deep ocean than in all of the museums in the world combined.” The great ship’s watery grave
Even a century later, though, exactly who should be the curator of this deep-water “museum” and its artifacts is a point of contention.
Last August, U.S. District Court Judge Rebecca Beach Smith awarded the exhibition firm RMS Titanic Inc. the rights to roughly 5,000 artifacts salvaged from the wreck site in six expeditions since 1993. The court’s caveat: The items must be put up for auction in one lot. Many of the artifacts are exhibited in traveling shows, and they range from jewelry to jackets to an 18-ton piece of hull that is now on permanent display at the Luxor Hotel in Las Vegas.
And far from the desert of Las Vegas, the wreck rests in pitch-darkness, sprawled across 1,000 acres of ocean floor.
The ship’s bow plunged 60 feet into the mud at the end of its descent, the famous prow still towering above the seafloor. Turned backward and twisted like a beer can, the ship’s battered stern lies roughly in line with the bow about 2,000 feet away. Scattered about the wreckage are bits of the hull, small boilers, plates, luggage, wine bottles, shoes and other personal items the passengers and crew of a luxury liner would have had at their disposal.
“Likely there are millions of artifacts,” says NOAA attorney Ole Varmer. And there are possibly human remains: “The shipwreck is a tomb and a memorial, as well as a time capsule.”
RMS Titanic retrieved items from the debris field between the stern and bow, says explorer P.H. Nargeolet (pronounced Nar-jo-lay), who led much of the firm’s salvage work since 1993.
“It was a tremendous experience when we first saw it, like a shrine emerging out of the darkness,” Nargeolet says. “We just started to recover items from the debris field, just a plate we started with.”
In between salvage operations, filming trips and archaeological surveys, the wreck has become a tourist site, where well-heeled visitors view the wreckage from inside small Russian subs. As a result, beer cans and other trash litter the seafloor near the wreck, Delgado says. Disturbing the wreck
As with all things Titanic, there’s no consensus on what effect the submarine visits have on the site. Ballard has raised concerns that subs landing on the deck might be contributing to the ship’s deterioration. But Delgado believes otherwise: “The (Russian) pilots are very good. I do not believe the subs themselves are damaging the ship greatly.”
Delgado is, however, concerned that dumped trash is feeding bacteria that are eating away at the ship. In response, U.S. Coast Guard Adm. Brian Salerno sent the International Maritime Organization a letter in January asking ships to stop dropping trash or sewage within 10 nautical miles of the wreck. Scientists “have documented an alarming amount of garbage and debris left behind by surface vessels on or near the wreckage,” Salerno wrote, and he called for extra care by tour operators as the anniversary approaches.
In at least one area, though — the cause of the ship’s demise — archaeologists and explorers are largely in agreement. “The captain ran the ship at night despite warnings, and it hit an iceberg. It’s that simple,” Ballard says. “A lot of people want to pin it on faulty rivets or metal, but its sister ship crossed the Atlantic 500 times without that being a problem.”
Even so, the mystery has lost none of its allure, consuming marine architects and amateur sleuths alike for decades. Philip Sims, a former U.S. Navy marine architect, says Ballard and his team’s discovery opened up “the whole ocean of undersea wrecks,” particularly because of revolutionary deep-sea technology. Sims will be a speaker today at the International Marine Forensics Symposium in National Harbor, Md., where attendees will revisit the sinking of Titanic and other famed ships.
The liveliest discussion about Titanic these days involves its future. Since its discovery in 1985, dueling visions for how to best save the memory of the ship have played out in international negotiations, courtrooms and on the ocean floor.
“You can’t ‘Raise the Titanic,’ ” Ballard says, a reference to a critically panned 1980 movie based on that idea. Doing so “would destroy it.”
“When Ballard’s team discovered Titanic, she was in very good shape, much better than ships in shallow water,” Sims says. “But she is going to end up as a pile of rust on the bottom of the ocean.” Hope, or hopeless?
How fast that will happen is a matter of debate. Ballard notes that conditions on the ocean floor — “cold, dark, perfect for preservation” — suggest that the wreck will last a long time, if left alone, especially sections of the bow sealed in 60 feet of mud.
“When I went down to the Titanic, I saw the anti-fouling paint on the bottom of the ship is intact, still protecting the hull,” Ballard says.
In contrast, Nargeolet says he has watched the steel ship steadily decay over the years, with tendrils of “rusticle” bacteria colonies eating away at the wreck, and deck plates thinning so much that they suddenly sprout large holes.
“I respect those who call for not touching the ship, and we deliberately only sought things in the debris field away from the ship,” Nargeolet says. “But I think, and some children of survivors have told me, that bringing their family’s items to the surface — a trunk or letters — has told the world their story in a way that otherwise would have been lost or forgotten.”
For his part, Ballard calls for strong measures to preserve the wreck, most notably scraping the hull clean and repainting it using deep-water robots. He also would like to see preservatives injected into the ship to kill bacteria, specifically in areas of the wreck where the water circulates very slowly.
“That’s great, but has anyone got a spare half-billion dollars to paint it?” Sims asks, after a back-of-theenvelope calculation.
Instead, simple measures, such as stopping anchor weights and garbage from being dropped onto the site, might help just as much, Delgado says. Indeed, marine biologists suspect that the sewage from tourist boats and other ships is feeding the bacteria blooming on the wreck. “If you can’t protect the Titanic, what can you protect?” asks Ballard, who envisions a sort of virtual museum of the site. He has called for assembling camera-equipped underwater robots as well as stationary cameras to give visitors above live scenes from the site. Instead of more artifact removal, he says, “with modern technology, if you jump forward a few years, you are going to be seeing live, underwater museums.”
A model for just such an experience comes from the wreck of the USS Monitor, the acclaimed Civil War gunship that is now the center of a marine sanctuary off Cape Hatteras, N.C. The sanctuary shares artifacts with the Mariners’ Museum in Newport News, Va., where visitors can observe the turret of the Monitor remotely by underwater camera.
“I think the future for Titanic is much as Bob Ballard envisioned it when he found it, as a marine sanctuary and museum,” says Varmer, the NOAA attorney. “Let’s be careful with Titanic, and keep most of it down there as a marine memorial.”