By 2001, the rusticle reef was growing out horizontally from the front rail, tracing the direction of the prevailing currents and sending forth slender shrublike branches of its own. During this same time, Vinogradov’s gorgon (identified as Chrysogorgia agassizi) had been growing steadily at one centimeter (almost half an inch) per year. The species was previously known to grow on rocky bottoms and atop old telegraph cables, at depths generally no greater than the deep scattering layer, where minute planktonic animals were widely available. Despite a long-presumed relative scarcity of prey, Vinogradov’s Titanic gorgon was sprouting more heads per branch, compared to its upper-water cousins (two or three polyps, versus only one or two), and it was growing four times faster.
Notwithstanding all we once thought we knew about the lack of food in this world without a sun, there was much more life in the so-called deserts of the deep than had been anticipated, and the Titanic was becoming a good place to be a filter feeder. The rusticle reef and the gorgon told us so; they drove home again explorer Ralph White’s mantra: for all we know, there is so much more we don’t know.
For those who looked with a parallax view into the crumbling triumph of civilization against nature, the corpse of the Titanic, though fascinatingly ugly from one angle, could be mournfully beautiful from another. Like the Colosseum—which in eighteenth-century paintings was overgrown by hanging gardens of wildflowers—even the most ordinary railings of the Titanic were a curious blend of natural and man-made lines. As the thirteenth expedition progressed, and bots Jake and Elwood penetrated into stateroom after stateroom, revealing that most of the plastered walls and ceilings had fallen away, bot-eye views became, on multiple laptop screens, a gallery exhibition of life aboard the Titanic during the last days and during the subsequent decades of a lost world.
In rusticle-draped rooms reminiscent of Luray Caverns, instead of seeing stalagmites sticking up from the floor, we beheld row after row of stateroom bedposts with their original Edwardian carvings, softened by bacterial erosion into hauntingly artistic shapes. Passenger Henry Sleeper Harper’s porthole was still open, just as he had last seen it, but it was the bedposts that caught my eye. One of the eroded wooden posts seemed to have a veiled female head precariously balanced at the top. I was reminded immediately of a chapel carved into a corner of an old east European salt mine, where the moist exhalations from centuries of congregations had similarly reworked the salt-carved statues of saints into impressive new sculptures of the sort Picasso might have made. Looking at the bacterially hewn bedpost sculptures, I decided that one of them did indeed resemble a Picassoesque Madonna and child.
Even as holes opened up on the boat deck and even as the Titanic’s ceilings and bulkheads became more rusticle stalactite than steel plate, the ship did not merely lie in state in its orange shroud. It was evolving into a living work of art.
Everywhere we looked, microbiologist Roy Cullimore’s “old lady, elegant lady” was alive. The steel decking above boiler room number 2 was now part of the rusticle reef’s skeletal and circulatory system. The boiler room was newly exposed, as if by a surgeon’s scalpel, allowing us to peer into the compartment where George Kemish had been standing during the very first rumblings of iron against ice. Rat-tailed fish patrolled the boilers at the aftermost part of the bow section—“like the sentries to hell,” Paxton remarked.
7
The Cascade Point
The critical turning point was 12:45 on Monday morning, April 15. Up to that moment, as the forward E-deck portholes came down almost level with the sea surface, the ship was actually approaching a chancy sort of balance with the twelve square feet of breaches inflicted by the collision. Although the state of equilibrium was tenuous, the rising water levels inside the punctured compartments were slowing to a halt, and the sea within had come almost level with the new waterline outside the ship.
Each boiler room could be sealed off at the roof by closing the casing hatches, which were somewhat like bottle caps. In theory, this feature added to the ship’s invincibility. In practice, the true power of water lay in its mass. A road flooded only one foot deep with water moving at only three miles per hour could easily carry away a one-ton car. This meant that just one bathtub full of water (or its equivalent volume and mass), pressing against a car at three miles per hour, could push the car completely off a road. The volume of water working against the interior dam that separated boiler room number 5 from the flooded compartments in the bow was many times greater than car-displacing bathtub volumes and roads flooded one-foot deep.
According to naval architect Edward Wilding, the bulkhead should normally have been able to resist a level of water pressing down upon it from significantly higher than E deck before reaching either the bending or the breaking strength of the steel—which was half an inch thick at the base of the dam and one-third inch thick at the top.
“Any height at all [of water],” Wilding explained to examiner Clement Edwards, “will produce a certain amount of bending. The steel is flexible.”
Edwards asked, “Assuming the water was up to fifty-five feet, with the flexibility of the steel, have you any idea to what extent it would cause a bend?” He was talking, of course, about a bulkhead already dented and made less flexible by a coal fire. “There would be a certain point reached by the bend,” the examiner continued. “Which [do you think], might cause a displacement of the rivets?”
The dam in boiler room number 5 was the tipping point at which the sinking could either be slowed or be dramatically quickened. Wilding insisted that the rivets, according to his math, would not give way until the forces exerted against them reached seven-eighths the break strength of the steel. He added that the height of water above the dam was “nothing like enough to do that.”
“Nothing like?” asked Edwards.
“Nothing like,” Wilding insisted.
Edwards continued to press the question, wanting to understand whether it had been possible for the water to create a bend in the wall of riveted steel plates sufficient to cause displacement of the rivets and, in such a manner, indirectly trigger the springing of steel plates along some part of the dam.
“No,” Wilding insisted again; then, after several seconds of reflection, the shipbuilder came back with a question of his own: “Do you mean to push [the rivets] out or to make them slightly loose in the hole?”
“I mean to make them slightly loose in the hole to begin with, and then to cause a movement of the plates or a movement of the [plate supports, or] stiffeners.”
Wilding acknowledged that loosening the rivets would occur much earlier than their actual popping or being pushed out.
“And the moment [that] a loosening [is] begun,” Edwards pressed, “there might be an accelerated process of displacement?”
“No, I think not,” Wilding replied.
“You think not?” Edwards asked.
“I think not,” Wilding insisted, adding that even if the rivets could put up only seven-eighths the resistance of the steel plates, then according to calculations based on almost identical bulkheads, tested in tanks filled with water, the Titanic’s boiler room number 5 bulkhead should have held back the sea even with more than a hundred feet of water pressing down upon it.