|
|
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
||
|
 |
|||
|
Reports written by Susan
Wels
|
Images produced by Matt Tulloch | |||
 |
||||
 |
Tuesday, August 11, 1998
"I had been with [Captain Smith] many years...and it was an education to see him con his own ship up through the intricate channels entering New York at full speed. One particularly bad corner, known as the South-West spit, used to make us fairly flush with pride as he swung her round...with only a few feet to spare between each end of the ship and the banks."
|
|||
 Now
I know why they call the Nautile riders cowboys.This evening, at 8:00 p.m., after a six-and-a-half-hour dive, the yellow sub reached the surface in the middle of a ferocious mid-Atlantic squall. As usual, one of the Nadir’s divers, Toussaint "Toune" Edmond, climbed onto the top of Nautile to attach it to the Nadir’s lifting gear. In 10-foot waves, with water charging 15 feet over the fantail, he rode the sub like a bronco as it bucked and dove, then stayed on it as it rose, swinging wildly, under the ship’s A-frame. Toune says this kind of weather is more fun. Not too many, however, seem to share Toune’s opinion. On the Ocean Voyager, when the squall hit, there were numerous cases of mal de mer. Things got more complicated when Zodiac runs between the four expedition ships were cancelled due to the bad weather, stranding 15 extra people on the O.V. People are sleeping everywhere—on the floor, on benches, wherever they can find space, while the vessel pitches and rolls throughout the storm. |
||||
 The
Nadir has ended up with an extra overnight guest, too—Dr.
D. Roy Cullimore, a microbiologist who has spent the day diving to the
Titanic’s stern aboard Nautile.The sub’s rocky return to the surface didn’t bother him, he says. If anything, he would have liked to spend more time on the Nautile, so he could get a better look at the Titanic’s stern. "It’s a mangled mess of steel," he explains, "that shows the tremendous forces at work when the Titanic sank." What especially intrigues him is the rate at which the ship seems to be deteriorating. Dr. Cullimore estimates that the wreck is losing a tenth of a ton of iron every day to iron-eating rusticles, microbial communities that have colonized the ship. He predicts that the Titanic has only 20 years left before it suffers what he calls a "biological implosion" and collapses as its infrastructure fails. |
||||
 His
main mission is to learn more about the rusticles. Today, to investigate
their feeding preferences, he left samples of 15 different types of steel
under the Titanic’s engines in the stern, where they’ll
remain for an entire year.Rusticles are unusual biological formations, he says, "because they are consortiums of different microbes, growing and cooperating in ways that we simply don’t see on the surface of the earth." Back to the Expedition Calendar |
||||
 |
 |
 |
||
