alright everyone is being sassy but nobody has brought up the actual reason why scientists are interested in the titanic in the notes
Per wikipedia:
The Titanic was made of steel, presumably to resist corrosion (i mean. thats why boats are made of steel i assume) but even when iron/steel rusts people did not expect to find like. decomposition. bacteria are EATING the titanic.
and there's wood furniture from the titanic that isn't decaying. hell, there are wood ships at the bottom of the ocean that archaeologists study. so the expectation people have for the titanic is not that the steel would decompose at the bottom of the ocean. Even in 100 years, since there are much more ancient preserved wooden ships iirc.
(im not particularly knowledgeable about ships, i just had heard about the science going on around the titanic so i wanted to clarify that on this post for people)
The Titanic is an exceptionally weird whalefall basically.
Not a marine biologist but biologist enough to weigh in on this. The reason we have iron eating bacteria but not wood eating bacteria at the bottom of the ocean is simple. Hydrothermal vents release a cocktail of different mineral ores into the ocean. And bacteria and other organisms evolved alongside those so they evolved to digest these, like iron or other metal ores
Wood however does not exist at the bottom of the ocean since it basically never sinks down, even when logs are flushed out into the ocean they basically never end up at the ocean floor. So there's no bacteria that evolved to decompose lignin, which is already complex enough to decompose on the surface. And that's why wooden ships or the furniture on the Titanic stay intact for hundreds of years or longer.
Okay, but I remember reading a magazine stating that the titanic would basically be gone by now because of the rust eating the ship.
The sister ship HMHS Britannic is still perfectly preserved because of the way it sank, and partly in due to the coral that has grown around it keeping the structure in tact I believe was the reason.
Coral acting like a living fossil specifically for sunken ships is the coolest thing I've ever heard
So lemme get this straight, the Titanic is a whalefall, the Britannic is a biological mummy, and all the wood ships that sink into the deep ocean are preserved incorrupt because nothing can eat them.
Zombie, mummy, lich, respectively.
I just want to add that wood may not end up in the deep sea constantly enough to have caught the interest of bacteria, but the deep ocean has an echinoderm we call a "sea daisy" that only eats wood.
Ok but wood falls absolutely ARE a thing in the ocean and they DO occur frequently enough that many forms of ocean life have specially evolved to thrive on wood!!
NOW. These wood falls do not tend to happen in Arctic or Antarctic waters, which is why wooden ships that sink in those waters don’t get eaten. But wooden ships that sink where wood falls are common GET EATEN.
Chemosynthetic Oases | Deep Sea Food-Falls and Wood-Falls. The first 100 people to download Endel by clicking the link below will get a free
