Written by Silas Lucas
12,500 feet below the surface. Deep in the ocean, nothing surrounding you for miles and miles. Dark blue on all sides, and pitch black.
That is where the Titanic is at, 2 and a half miles down, with currents as strong as 4 knots. The ship, which sank in 1912, was an event that went down in history from the moment it happened. Titanic, the unsinkable ship, had been pulled to the bottom of the sea in just two and a half hours. And now, in modern time, the giant historical monument is slowly melting away, getting eaten away at, by a newly discovered bacteria.
The shipwreck had gone largely undiscovered and lost to the ocean for 75 years, with all of its history and artifacts along with it. Until in 1985, when the oceanographer Robert Ballard had discovered it using groundbreaking deep-sea diving technology for its time. Among this dive, when using the Agro television cameras and sonars, pictures of the Titanic in her final resting place were taken, but something was rather peculiar about them.
On the bow and stern of the Titanic, were rust colored, icicle shaped rusticles.
What Are They?
The rusticles that cake and cover the RMS Titanic are essentially tiny microbes that are feeding off of the shipwreck of the Titanic. They are bacteria that eat steel, metal, and iron, and store it for nutrients. They cover the entirety of the shipwreck, but thrive more on the stern side of the ship, due to its smaller size compared to the stern section because of how damaged the stern was when it split from the bow.
“Inside this tough exterior, the inside is extremely fragile. They’re filled with millions of ducts and tunnels and passageways, and all of these little cavities. And all sorts of nutrients are stored in there.” -Lori Johnston, Microbial Ecologist circa Investigating The Titanic, via NatGeo Drain The Oceans.
The rusticles are composed of iron, calcium, chloride, magnesium, silica, sodium, and sulfate, and are expected to have eaten away at the Titanic enough by 2030 that it will eventually cave in. It is even expected that in a few hundred years, the shipwreck will be gone completely.
Why Does It Matter?
The fact that the rusticles are eating away at such a hugely important historical wreck is important because in 500-1000 years, the RMS Titanic will be completely gone from the ocean floor, with the only thing remaining of this historical event being artifacts and pictures, before it will fade away from the history books of future societies forever.
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