Georgyj Vinogradov and the other Russian biologists corroborated the observation that something interesting was happening here. During a 1996 French-American-Canadian expedition, we had charted a greater than 75 percent increase in the number of brittle stars and sea cucumbers (both cousins of the starfish) living outside the Titanic’s debris field, compared with the population density of these same bottom-dwelling echinoderms recorded during Ballard’s 1986 expedition. Since 1991, Vinogradov and his colleagues (people who were literally writing the books on deep-ocean wildlife) had been watching the area for miles around the Titanic, while it transformed into the deep-ocean equivalent a forest from what in the 1980s had seemed to be a biological desert.
Flowerlike crinoids and sea squirts were growing anywhere their stems could find anchorage, including atop rocks dropped by passing icebergs and on lumps of coal from the Titanic. Unusually long-legged, bright red hermit crabs were on the march, often using, as a protective helmet, the shell of an unidentified snail species whose defensive exoskeleton appeared to be made mostly of rubber. A calcium-secreting worm thrived on all solid surfaces, from the occasional boulder to the Titanic’s rusticles.
Red krill were drifting about—not swarming, as they do in upper waters. They appeared to be solitary hunters and scavengers. A previously unknown organism was building nests on the seabed from tiny, individually selected black pebbles (selected from an environment in which the majority of the pebbles being dropped by icebergs were white quartz). The pebbles were bound together with a silklike twine into inchlong hollow tubes. Evidently, the web spinners abandoned the protective stony tubes as they grew, building successively larger shelters up to four inches long. And just as evidently, the black pebbles were chosen because they made the tubes harder to see, notwithstanding our presumption that the world of the Titanic and its web spinners lacked any light source significant enough to make such selection necessary.
No one had yet found one of the pebble tubes with the creature that built it still inside. They resembled the stony shelters of freshwater caddis-fly larvae, but despite their apparent familiarity, as far as we knew, no insect had ever conquered the deep sea, so we were looking at the home of something no one had seen yet.
A one-liter jar full of surface-layer sediment (adding up to about a quart) from our sunless abyss, collected nearly two miles north of the Titanic, contained almost two thousand shrimplike arthropods of several species—all of them smaller than garden variety ants, many of them barely larger than grains of sand. Unsegmented worms dominated the samples, uncounted new species—fistfuls of them sometimes residing in just a few liters of surface-layer mud. Cicada-sized, spindly red octopi roved about in the company of a black bioluminescent species of fish that appeared to be all mouth, with a huge eye on either side of its jaws. The fish was eerily intimidating even if it was only two inches long.
In general, twelve liters (just over twelve quarts) of mud scraped from the top inch of the deep-ocean plain—whether gathered near the Titanic or ten kilometers (slightly more than six miles) away—yielded for us nearly a liter of worms, arthropods, and hard-shelled limpets. Collectively they represented up to several hundred species. The mud around the Titanic was roiling with at least as much life as mud from the floor of the Amazon rain forest; and this count did not even get near the microbial base of the food chain, which we suspected was growing under the influence of increasing levels of deep-ocean “snow.” Something appeared to be causing more nutrients to drift down from the deep scattering layer, more than a mile above the Titanic.
No one could say with any degree of certainty what was causing the increased nutrient throughput. All that could be said for sure was that a measurable change was taking place. Our latest rusticle samples showed marked growth spurts during the last seven cycles of ring deposition—an actual doubling of growth rates. This was consistent with other indications that something had been happening that was indeed quite different from a prior record of relatively lifeless deep ocean plains, as memorialized in thick clays just a few inches beneath Vinogradov’s mud samples.
At a guess, overfishing—to such an extent that more than 90 percent of the North Atlantic cod were gone and swordfish boats were being required from about 1990 to hunt farther and farther east—was removing so many predators from the equation that the deep scattering layer was undergoing a population surge. We wondered if something else, by the hand of humans, was bringing about the change, or maybe what we were seeing was the result of some as yet undiscovered natural cycle, perhaps amplified by the spread of civilization.
Vinogradov agreed that the Titanic’s rusticles seemed to have begun growing at a biologically explosive rate. During only a decade, the thin steel decking at the rear part of the bow section had been metabolized by the invader (whose growth also depended on biological nutrients in the water)—to the point of total disintegration. The decks once covered the rear boilers like a garment, but rusticles had now stripped them away, making the front half of boiler room number 2 visible for the first time.
The Titanic was presently a very different ship from the one that Ballard had first landed on in 1986, different even from the ship Vinogradov had first seen in 1991. The starboard boat deck, from just behind the second smokestack all the way forward to the grand stairway entrance, almost to boat 5’s location, had collapsed down into the promenade deck. The entire gymnasium was falling with it. Alongside the cavity where the first smokestack once stood, the roof and the starboard wall of Captain Smith’s quarters were devoured, revealing the skipper’s rusticle-encroached bathtub.
Ten years earlier, our submersibles would have landed on a completely level steel deck outside the captain’s still-intact quarters. Now the deck was rippled, resembling swells at sea, frozen in midroll. Fortunately, our multi-ton submersibles, once submerged, became undersea blimps, flying at close to zero buoyancy, touching down with barely more negative buoyancy than an overfed cat. These days, if a mass equal to one of the Titanic’s own lifeboats were placed on the starboard boat deck, it would most likely fall through to the deck below and continue falling. The rusticles had done their work. The steel was now a house of cards, accelerating toward total collapse.
When Ballard first photographed the uppermost rail on the Titanic’s point bow in 1986, the railing itself still appeared almost new, with only an occasional rusticle bud breaking out here and there. In 1991, rusticle growths enclosed the entire head of the rail’s stem, and Georgyj Vinogradov photographed a delicate gorgonarian colony flowering atop the rusticle consortium.
A relative of the hydra, “Georgyj’s gorgon” was named after the trinity of mythological monstrous sisters that included Medusa. The flowerlike growth was really a colony of branching “snakeheads.” Each head sent forth its own set of branches: eight poisonous tentacles surrounding a mouth.
Under the gorgon’s trunk, as the rusticle consortium grew in strength, absorbing organic debris from the water and metabolizing iron, zinc, and sulfur while converting more and more of the Titanic’s mass into its own shell-plating and DNA, so too grew the gorgon.