Mon, Aug 11, 2003 page16

• 'Titanic' faces a second death

  Nearly a century after it sank the famous ship is disintegrating due to enviornment and human depredations

  • NY TIMES NEWS SERVICE
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  The Titanic, assailed by rust as well as by hundreds of explorers and moviemakers, salvors and tourists (including a couple who were married in a miniature submarine on its bow), is rapidly falling apart.

  The world's most famous shipwreck was found in 1985 resting on the North Atlantic seabed more than 3.2km down, upright but split in two. Its discoverers pronounced it in a fair state of preservation after 73 years in icy darkness and estimated that the wreck would change little in their lifetimes.

  But it has the weakest of legal protections to fend off humans who are loving it to death, and no protections at all against rust, corrosive salts and microbes feeding on the hulk.

  Divers who have visited the Titanic in the past decade report that its disintegration is accelerating. The crow's nest, where a lookout warned, "Iceberg right ahead!" has vanished. The forward mast has crumpled. The captain's cabin, where the captain was resting when the ship struck the iceberg, has collapsed as has the poop deck where passengers gathered as the liner sank.

  Gaping holes have opened up in the Titanic's decks, metal walls have slumped and rivers of rust known as rusticles, which look like brownish icicles hanging from the ship's iron plates, have multiplied so fast that in some places they cover the hull.

  "I was shocked," said Alfred S. McLaren, an ocean scientist and retired submariner who dived onto the wreck in 1999 and again last month. "It's much more heavily deteriorated. I expected her to be in about the same shape as 1999. But, God almighty, there's more rusticles everywhere."

  Paul H. Nargeolet, a French minisub pilot who has explored the wreck more than 30 times, said each dive revealed new damage.

  "Things are going quicker and quicker," he said. Between visits, Nargeolet observed, the roof of the gymnasium had collapsed and a big hole had opened up on the boat deck, where some of the Titanic's women and children climbed into lifeboats and were lowered to safety.

  The US government has grown interested in the Titanic's fate and is talking with France, Britain and Canada about how best to preserve what remains of history's most famous luxury liner. In June the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration sent six scientists down to survey the wreck and start the process of assessing its condition and its future.

  Scientists and maritime experts say the worsening decay is caused by natural forces like the corrosive effect of salt water, as well as human activity, which has increased markedly over the years despite the pleas of Titanic societies to respect the wreck as a grave site.

  Perhaps the most surprising theory, advanced by McLaren, is that the overfishing of the Grand Banks, close to where the Titanic sank, has produced an explosion in tiny marine life that is normally eaten but now falls steadily, like a never-ending snow, exacerbating the ship's rusting.

  "The snow feeds the rusticles, and they become more active and extract more iron from the ship," said Roy Cullimore, a Canadian microbiologist who has visited the wreck three times, most recently in June.

  People are also taking a heavy toll, the visitors say. The surrounding site is littered with beer and soda bottles, pieces of line, weights, chains and cargo nets -- mostly from salvage efforts, which have focused on the ship's extensive debris fields.

  Visitors to the wreck, descending in the miniature deep-sea submarines known as submersibles, which usually hold three people, have littered some of the ship's most prominent areas with nearly a dozen plaques and memorials, including artificial flowers.

  In 1996, divers found wreckage from a submersible accident scattered on a Titanic deck. They hauled up a half dozen pieces.

  Tourists have paid up to US$36,000 per dive. In July 2001, A New York couple, David Leibowitz and Kimberley Miller, married in a submersible resting on the Titanic's bow. (A ship's captain officiated from the surface, speaking to the couple through a hydrophone.)

  "Visitors do more damage than anybody else," said Ed Kamuda, president of the Titanic Historical Society Inc, in Springfield, Massachusetts "The thing is going to deteriorate anyway, but it doesn't help when you've got all these subs going by, disturbing the sediment and whatnot."

  Salvors, who since 1987 have recovered thousands of artifacts, have long argued that the wreck's inevitable decay made their work important, even as critics questioned their integrity and thoroughness. Now, the accelerated damage seems likely to bolster their arguments.

  Emory Kristof, an undersea photographer for National Geographic magazine who went on the discovery voyage in 1985 and dived on the Titanic in 1991 to help make a movie, said recovery efforts were helping save the ship for posterity.

  "Gathering up material from the ship and putting it on display, I find nothing wrong with that," he said. "It helps preserve a great legend of the 20th century."

  The tragedy began on the frigid night of April 14, 1912, when the Titanic -- the largest and most luxurious ship afloat, an icon of the Edwardian era aglitter with pearls and mahogany, socialites and industrialists -- hit an iceberg and sank on its inaugural voyage from Southampton, England, to New York. More than 1,500 people died. A French-American team found the wreck in international waters 612km off Newfoundland in 1985, the bow and stern a kilometer apart. Strewn in between were a field of wine bottles and fine china, shoes and spittoons. The discoverers found no bodies or bones.

  Robert D. Ballard, a leader of the mission, at first called for the recovery of some artifacts but later argued that the site should be left alone as a memorial. In his 1987 book, The Discovery of the `Titanic', he wrote that the wreck, if unmolested by treasure hunters, "won't appear to change much in my lifetime."

  Nearly a decade later, worried about deterioration, the wreck's salvors, RMS Titanic Inc of Atlanta, hired Cullimore, the Canadian microbiologist, to help assess the ship's condition. During a 1996 dive and expedition, he discovered that its rivers of rust were populated by microbes and estimated that each day they removed 90kg of iron from the ship's bow.

  Two years later, after Cullimore dived to the wreck again, he found that the biological activity had intensified and estimated that the microbes were removing 270kg of iron a day.

  In April 2001, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration issued guidelines for research, exploration and salvage of the Titanic.

  The agency "expects that the hull and structure of the ship may collapse to the ocean floor within the next 50 years, perhaps sooner." The aim of the guidelines, the agency added, "is to discourage activities that would accelerate the ship's deterioration."

  For instance, the guidelines call for no holes to be cut in the ship's hull. The guidelines are just advisory, however, and are not legally enforceable.

  Late in the summer of 2001, James Cameron, director of the movie Titanic, sailed to the site to film Ghosts of the Abyss, an IMAX movie that opened last April.

  "Time was of the essence because the Titanic is collapsing," the filmmakers said in a news release, adding that scientists estimated that sections of the wreck would "collapse sometime within the next 20 to 30 years."

  Last year, the climate of uncertainty grew as pirates lowered a robot down to the wreck, working without permission of the legal salvors.

  "They were trying to recover some artifacts," said Nargeolet, the French submersible pilot. "They dove on the bow section and tried to recover the pedestal of the wheel, the only thing left in the middle of the bridge. I heard that people saw a lot of damage."

  This June, using twin Russian submersibles, the NOAA dived to the wreck, taking two microbiologists (including Cullimore), two archaeologists and two agency shipwreck experts.

  Larry E. Murphy, an archaeologist for the National Park Service who went on the expedition, said it was done to determine how to measure multiple processes of decay and come up with a credible estimate of the rate of deterioration.

  "The sad thing," he said, "is that with all the gathering of artifacts, there's still not a reliable map that's been done and we know very little about what's going on with the site. We have anecdotal observations, but very little science."

  He said the federal team made a photo mosaic of the wreck for first time since its 1985 discovery. "Now," he added, "we have a basis for comparison."

  In July, private experts, including McLaren, an emeritus president of the Explorers Club in New York, used the Russian submersibles to explore the Titanic's state of decay.

  David A. Bright, a team member, compared the expedition's own photos to those of earlier explorations. He found walls collapsing, structures rotting away, joints widening, tears developing in hull plates and rusticles growing vibrantly.

  The Titanic, McLaren and Bright concluded, "has been losing its structural integrity at a rapid rate and she is in danger of collapsing."
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