Thanks for the link. I was hoping that someone was going through and cataloging as much of the Titanic as possible. Hopefully we get to the point where we can turn drones loose to explore the ship as much as possible before it degrades.
Love Titanic history and all of its glory - a magnificent machine doomed by human arrogance and hubris (we even went so far as to call it "unsinkable").
"It's slowly being consumed by a thriving undersea ecosystem — and by what scientists suspect is sheer human greed."
I was confused by this statement, how is it being consumed by human greed?
I clicked on the link and it brought me to an article titled "Stop plundering of the Titanic, says expert who found wreck" and said "Russians are selling dives"[1]
How can anyone be diving down to the Titanic and stealing from it? It's 12,500 feet below the ocean's surface. The deepest humans can dive with scuba gear is about 350 feet. Sure, maybe they are taking robots down there, but how many such commercial under water robots exist that can go down to that depth? Aren't these very expensive robots? I doubt these are being used for tourist scavenger hunting trips to the Titanic?
> Dr Ballard also displayed photos to the audience showing areas where rust on the ship had been disturbed by what he believes to be robotic submarines landing on its surface.
As for the robots, I have no idea how many 4,000m capable WROVs are operating around the world, but it is measured in the high hundreds, if not low thousands. My past and current employer alone have delivered handling equipment for some 250 ROVs combined.
(These are heavy duty unmanned underwater vehicles, tethered to a ship via an umbilical cable. Operator sits topside, sees what is going on via cameras, operating a pair of manipulator arms and assorted tools via fancy joysticks. Think a drone on steroids, Mad Max style.)
And yes, they are expensive, as is the vessel you need to support them.
Artifacts have been periodically salvaged from the wreck between 1987-2000. RMS Titanic Corp now has title to those artifacts and has periodically talked about returning to the wreck to salvage more. The whole thing has been tied up in court cases since the 1987 expedition, which is par for the course with international maritime salvage.
> In 1999, investors from SFX Entertainment, along with co-founder G. Michael Harris and Arnie Geller, led a takeover and ousting of George Tulloch and the company's attorney.[23] Geller was installed as President and CEO of the company and Harris was installed as Chief Operating Officer as well as Secretary of RMS Titanic, Inc. They fired all other officers and directors and were the only two remaining directors.[24] John Joslyn was a small shareholder and took part in the takeover of the company in 1999.[25] Tulloch sued and was awarded $2.5 million in damages.[26] The abrupt takeover alarmed the governments of the U.K., France, Canada, and the U.S., especially when one of the insurgent investors was quoted as saying the new management was intent on cutting into Titanic's hull to recover more treasures and gain increased profits.
The Titanic's journey would have taken it West, so it would have continued to sail over deep waters for hundreds of nautical miles, but the place it happened to sink was situated just off an underwater peninsula in the continental plate.
Oxidation processes are studied in various environments, important to understand in complex issues such as acid mine drainage.
The chemical reactions are driven by a combination of biological (bacteria, eg.), physical, and chemical processes, in a feedback loop.
After much research and study, one of the best practices is to keep such material submerged under water. (Deep enough to prevent oxygen transfer from surface.)
In such deeper waters, the processes eventually stop or at least slow down, reaching a sort of, equilibrium.
It's a fascinating and complex field - in which mathematical modelling can help, but requires non linear differential equations for real world accuracy. (In the past, only linear methods were used, to simplify the models.)
Waste water becomes acidic, this leaches out more metals from rocks, thus increasing available reaction material, thus increase in acidity, etc. Can cause cyclic blooms of highly contaminated waste water, followed by normal flows. (Similar reaction cycles happens under landfills, grain or coal stockpiles, etc.)
> What's become of that? We have less than seven years to go. (taps wristwatch)
Considering that claim is cited to a republished version of an article [1] from the tabloid The Sun [2] (apparently from the credible-sounding "virals" section), I would guess the claim was exciting but wrong or misreported.
The bacteria causing the erosion have actually been discovered there and are named after the ship. It wouldn’t be at all unusual to be somewhat wrong about that estimate in such a unique situation. It rather seems like a typical case of a researcher making a wild guess and media presenting it as proven fact.
Might be they estimated based how quickly bacteria eats pure metal, but it could be covered with something that protects it, dust, rust, another bacteria, some chemistry that is synthesized there over decades.
My gut tells me the biggest source of error is they probably estimated it in a clean-room environment for the bacteria.
Bacteria in the wild are perpetually in a war for survival with other bacteria (and larger organisms) that see them as an incredibly convenient source of aggregated biomass and carbohydrates. I'd expect the rate at which they chew through metal in the wild is attenuated by predators on them increasing predation as their numbers grow.
That I've seen, the "2030" was an estimate of when the forward hull section would completely collapse.
Underwater or not - the forward hull is a tall metal structure, weighing thousands of tons. At some point, corrosion of the load-bearing elements will weaken it too far to withstand gravity and currents. There will be a major collapse, with (my guess) the decks mostly pancaking, and a fair amount of the sides being blown outward. Along with a huge amount of "little stuff" from inside.
Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution is always hiring engineers to join projects like the DSV Alvin submersible group that led the expedition that discovered RMS Titanic.
It seems that the wires prevent the drones to go further inside the ship, so I wonder if they can be made wireless? If radio is not working in such conditions maybe sonic or light signal can get through?
At the time, the technology was not nearly trustworthy enough to run the millions-of-dollars ROV untethered.
Nowadays, we could probably build it smaller, untethered, and semi-autonomous (but that hunch is not intended to undercut the tons of work it would take to do it).
In broad strokes, how would you do such an endeavour? At those depths it seems impossible, unless some massive technological breakthrough has happened very recently.
Acoustic signalling for control (which would have to be done very carefully to account for echo, motor noise, etc), with a great deal of onboard navigation via LIDAR and onboard cameras. Signalling would be high-level.
It's entirely possible data couldn't be delivered back to the parent machine until a physical connection could be established; not sure if acoustic signalling can be made high-bandwidth enough for video. Line-of-sight laser modulation could be used for high-bandwidth once the ROV is out of the bulk of the ship.
Remote control with acoustics is undoubtedly feasible. Getting a return picture so you're not doing it blind is probably not. It would be much easier to make the drone autonomous and self pathfinding, but even that's quite state of the art and would be placing a lot of faith in your code to not get confused/lost/crash in the process.
Radio is very poor underwater. Especially deep water. Ultrasonic communication can be used, but probably not suitable for exploring the interior of a shipwreck - probably needs line-of-sight to work properly.
This is a very fun fact because it describes why we see the wavelengths that we do!
Visible light is pretty much just the portion of the EM spectrum that is poorly absorbed by water [0] (and that is also produced by the sun and also poorly absorbed by atmosphere)
If radio worked well in water (where eyes first evolved), then we would just "see" radio waves (except in practice the Sun doesn't make enough of them that reach Earth).
I did some reading on this a while back, since I was also morbidly interested, and I believe that they said they found lots of evidence of shoes because they contained the only material that the sea life around them wouldn't eat
Unfortunately, did some quick looking up right now to confirm, and it looks like it's theorized that the shoes were more from luggage that was blown out. But any human body parts would definitely have been long consumed or dissolved by now
