For almost a hundred years, discussions about the destructive forces at work the night the Titanic sank had focused on the power of the ship’s collision with the iceberg, but the iceberg was minuscule by comparison to the forces at work during the meteoritic impacts on the seabed.
In the bow section—which plunged to the bottom at a slower speed than the stern and therefore impacted more “gently”—a thick iron pillar, just outside the Turkish baths on F deck, was crushed out of line like a large letter C. The expectation was that the bath chamber itself would be crushed and shattered, just like the stairwell and corridor leading down to it. Then, to everyone’s astonishment, the minirobot, Gilligan, glided beneath a perfectly intact wall and ceiling of vestibule wood. Turning right, Gilligan entered a shock-cocooned room with intact tile walls and unbroken couches and chairs that appeared to have floated to the ceiling when the room flooded, then drifted gently to random positions on the floor as high-pressure water squeezed into every air-filled microcavity in the wood’s cell structure. Every one of Maude Slocomb’s polished ceramic tiles was still lining the walls, their colors still vibrant. Gilded wood trim and gilded lamps decorated the ceiling. The glass was unbroken, despite the fact that everything outside the room had been completely destroyed.
“Can you imagine the concussive force of the ship hitting the bottom, and yet this room has survived?” Jim Cameron reflected, looking at the gallery of Gilligan-eye views on his screens. “It’s as if time has just stopped. It’s hard to imagine where we are—how deep we are, how remote we are from the human world. And yet we find this beautiful place, like a little church on the bottom of the ocean.”
There were no currents bringing oxygenated water into Maude Slocomb’s Turkish baths; no “white worms” creating passages through the wood; no white crabs, anemones, or gorgons. This appeared to be a realm inhabited only by rusticle extrusions, which were emerging through seams in the walls and growing toward the floor in clusters, sometimes several yards long and rarely wider than a pencil, and quite unlike the rusticle growths in the stairwell outside, which were generally thicker than the trunk of a small tree.
As with the Apollo program in the 1960s and as with the robot Elwood in 2001, battery technology continued to be a black art with the minirobot fleet of 2005. On July 9, 2005, Jim Cameron wrote in an e-mail, “Charlie, the four new bots are in trouble (three of them, anyway). Lost three of them inside the wreck due to electronic failures, though hope to recover two.”
These were to be history’s second and third undersea rescues of one bot by another. The fantastic was becoming routine. “Managed to get into the Turkish baths,” Cameron continued, “for about one hour before vehicle failed. Exceptionally good state of preservation—like going into the tomb of Tutankhamun. Eerie and magnificent, and the colors were spectacular. Next leg, we are going out with the [mini] ‘X-bots’ plus [tried and tested] Jake and Elwood. Not taking any chances on live [Discovery Channel] show.”
I replied, “Had fascinating scientific conference [about] rusticles with Roy, Lori. . . . It’s not every day you find something that comes so close to defining a new kingdom of life. . . . The Consortia: [as you know], they are intensely symbiotic—so much so that we appear to be looking at a clear analogue of how tissue layers originated, back in the good old, old, old days. We are even seeing an immune system—which very effectively keeps ‘outsiders’ away from the rusticle consortium.
“And,” I continued, “while we may disagree with Lynn Margulis’s theory about bacteria (and not viruses) being the true culprits behind some viral epidemics—on this much, she has to be right: We are the multicellular result of bacterial symbiosis; we are all children of mud and bacteria. When we climbed out of the oceans, we took the chemical composition of seawater in our veins. We also carried along some of the pig-iron sludge, with the little Pacifics that carry oxygen to our hearts and our brains: Something like the biology of the rusticle lives on, in every atom of iron at the core of every molecule of hemoglobin.”
On July 10, Cameron wrote, “I forgot to mention the most amazing find in the Turkish baths—the rooms are [as you and Ken Marschall hoped] completely sheltered from any currents; and they have [these] very thin rusticles (as thin as 4–6mm [about a fifth of an inch] in diameter), hanging straight down from the ceiling almost to the floor. We’ve seen these before (in the number 1 cargo hold), though maybe not so long and straight. But here’s the kicker: A couple of them are growing up from the floor, and [they] end in a flowerlike cluster of tendrils, looking almost exactly like Triassic crinoids. Strange but true. No joke. I flew [the bot] all around one of them, couldn’t believe it. Rusticles cannot grow up. But these do. Figure that one out. I was thinking about Roy and Lori while I was imaging them. They will go nuts for this one.”
“Jim, I’m already going nuts for this one myself,” I replied. “But believe it or not, it’s not entirely surprising. We have some [rusticles] preserved from the 1996 [expedition] that actually did grow upward (but not much more than a couple of centimeters up). And when it suited them, they seemed to grow in every other direction. They [the “upstarts”] were sheltered in the curl of a completely twisted piece of steel.
“Similar structures were also imaged by the robot Robin [in 1993], growing inside the Titanic, on a pile of mail bags; but they were living under conditions similar to what you encountered with Jake [in 2001], in the forward crew quarters: Lots of bacterial floc [in places, more than ankle-deep]. The mailbag “reeds”—growing straight up from a layer of biofilm that enveloped the bags themselves—did not have a great deal of iron in their structure; and they were more in line with [another Archaea-including organism discovered in certain caves], called ‘snotsicles.’ This new discovery, in the Turkish baths, confirms what we (of team Rusticle) have been mostly guessing till now but could not be sure of, beyond speculation. [If proven], this is a pretty major discovery. Welcome to the pre-pre-Precambrian (the pre-Edicarian) [Period]. Welcome to 3 billion BC, inside the Titanic.”
Cameron replied on Sunday, July 10, 2005, “Charlie, this was not a snotsicle—definitely rust-orange in color, thinner than a pencil, about one meter [yard] tall, perfectly straight, dividing into three or four tendrils at the top which splayed up and outward, curling slightly about 3–5 cm [almost 2 inches]. It was a rust-flower. I’ll see if I can send you some video frames.”
Like any good mystery, the video raised more questions than it answered. We could see brass lamps that still appeared to be polished—with their bulbs, of course, long ago imploded by water pressure. The idea of rusticle flowers growing up from the floor suggested something even more ancestral to plants and animals than we had dreamed. Cameron had asked for an explanation of how rusticle fronds could grow upward.
I supposed that the phenomenon could have started out like the soft reeds atop the mailbags, rising initially by growing buoyantly. Afterward, perhaps, the part of the consortium that “loved” iron increased in proportion, slowly adding iron oxide structural supports, like the “shell” that enclosed the standard rusticle sample.