Sinkable, p.20
Sinkable, page 20
“When we dive the wrecks, we always come up quite emotional,” Allison Selman told me one evening from Perth, where she and her husband live. “You can see shoes at the end of the bed, uniforms still folded, people’s books. You can imagine how life on these boats just stopped when they sank.”
Preserving history is a strong and visceral reason to safeguard ships. Yet the earnest efforts of the Selmans and others who delay the inevitable breakdown of wrecks seemed like Don Quixote levels of both virtue and complete futility, of human energy being wisely spent and foolishly wasted. The line between ambition and delusion is so thin, and in the world of shipwrecks, it sometimes doesn’t exist at all.
Over enough time, any human effort is mostly an unfair fight against the forces of nature. Despite the Selmans’ efforts, it’s easy to see year after year how the wrecks are jostled by typhoons and bleached by the sun. The world doesn’t change if a long-ago sailor’s shoes disintegrate or some old radios waste away. The Selmans’ bigger fear is that the wrecks will start leaking fuel into a biodiverse ecosystem.
The U.S. government shares this assessment. Somewhere in Maryland, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration keeps a list of PPWs, or Potentially Polluting Wrecks. Of more than twenty thousand known wrecks in U.S. waters, several hundred are considered at high risk of oil spills, and a handful of those are expected to release oil imminently, if they aren’t already. The worst one may be the SS Jacob Luckenbach, a troopship that survived World War II only to collide with another ship and sink in 1953 near San Francisco. It went down with more than four hundred fifty-seven thousand gallons of bunker fuel, some of which has been leaking for decades. In 2002, the California Department of Fish and Wildlife confirmed that several “mystery spills” on California’s coastline were linked to the Luckenbach.
The Titanic’s fuel was coal, not gasoline or oil, which posed little danger of an imminent spill. Yet even if its daily consumption of eight hundred twenty-five tons of coal were diesel instead, there would be few options to delay their eventual release. Had the wreck of the Titanic been protected with coats of paint or bricks of zinc, its breakdown might’ve been slowed, perhaps even stopped for a time. But routinely returning to an aging wreck two miles deep to apply new paint or metal cathodes for the sake of historical posterity or habitat protection would be an investment with diminishing returns. More than half a century after it disappeared, no one knew what to expect about the Titanic’s true condition. The bigger goal was just to find it. And on that hunt, no one had ever been closer than Jack Grimm.
* * *
The second stage of our expedition is pretty much on schedule, we are confident of our success,” Grimm said on April 11, 1981. Nine months had passed since his first expedition, with only three to go before his second one. July was the only suitable month to attempt a search expedition in the North Atlantic due to low wind and low swells, and Grimm had waited through the winter and spring for another chance, batting down skeptical questions about whether he could really find the ship.
Once he tallied all the receipts, the price tag for the first expedition had come to $1.25 million. Grimm paid most of the cost, but he believed that the next expedition would be cheaper, to the tune of $750,000, and that if he worked the phones, he could get some sponsors and investors.
As it happened, one practically fell in his lap. Bobby Blanco, a Cuban-born gambler, asked Grimm if he could toss a few nickels into the search. Blanco had hunted for the ship himself and lost his job as a restaurant manager when he spent too long in the North Atlantic the prior year. Blanco had bet all his remaining money on Grimm. And with one investor secured, more lined up, including Nelson Bunker Hunt, a billionaire who had previously tried to manipulate the market for silver by buying up every ounce he could find, only to see his fortune collapse when the market crashed.
Serious scientists also lined up to join Grimm, mindful that if he found it, their absence might be as notable as their presence. He had again recruited oceanographers Fred Spiess and William Ryan of Columbia’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory and an engineer named Tony Boegeman of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in San Diego. Several more big-name researchers came from Woods Hole in Massachusetts, from where the expedition would depart. For decades, Scripps and Woods Hole enjoyed a mostly friendly rivalry over who was first to make new ocean discoveries.
This sort of unbridled enthusiasm fueled the belief that the second expedition would be the final expedition, and that after the near miss of ’80, there was no doubt they’d triumph in ’81. The sense of inevitability enticed thousands of people to beg for a spot on the expedition. A third-grade class in Denver wrote to ask if they could tag along. Dozens of outside scientists wrote with detailed plans for how they could help raise the ship. Several young women sent pictures of themselves in bathing suits and offered to do “anything” to join the cruise. More than two dozen psychics said they “knew” where the ship was and offered to point it out—one of whom, an older man, presented as evidence that he had made four round-trip crossings on the Titanic before it went down.
These were easy to laugh off. But premature accolades did pose the problem of credit, and who would receive it for finding the ship. Grimm was the obvious candidate, but the scientists were reluctant to perform such extensive work only to see it clobbered in the media as superficial show business. Grimm had lured scientists to the project with a trade—help me find the ship and you can do whatever ocean experiments you want the rest of the time. Some of the younger scientists saw it as an opportunity to study the ocean floor and learn about earthquakes and landslides and the erosion of steel underwater. But Grimm was firm in his negotiation. And with his checkbook, he had the upper hand. He did, however, try to downplay his eventual place in history to keep morale high. He reminded the crew that the German businessman Heinrich Schliemann found Troy in 1873, and the British archaeologist Howard Carter found King Tut’s tomb in 1922. Both became famous, but neither eclipsed the bigger news of the discoveries themselves.
Besides, Grimm said, “Wouldn’t it be great just to find it?”
Reflecting this anticipation, the ’81 expedition crew swelled in size. Grimm arranged for a bigger boat, the Gyre, a one-hundred-seventy-four-foot-long research vessel that he rented for exactly two weeks from the U.S. Coast Guard. The Gyre was equipped with navigational gear and computers developed by the U.S. space program. It carried four miles of steel cable that connected to a torpedo-shaped device, nicknamed “the fish,” that would be towed through the water. Unlike the small sonar rig from the earlier summer, the “fish” carried a more elaborate system developed at Scripps called Deep Tow, which was capable of bouncing sonar signals through ocean sediment in case the ship was partially buried. It also carried sensitive magnetometers and a color camera, which would be helpful when bringing back detailed photographs of the Titanic. Grimm, naturally, had planned several steps ahead of this eventuality and arranged to commission the Aluminaut, the most advanced submersible on earth, to take humans down to the wreck on a future mission.
The morning the Gyre was set to depart, Grimm arrived late, which was a classic power move. His delay ensured the maximum number of reporters were on hand. Rather than talk to them all at once, Grimm, wearing a seersucker jacket and a Texas A&M baseball cap, asked them to line up, and he walked down the line answering questions like a celebrity arriving at an awards show.
“We have highly technical equipment,” he told one. “We’ll find her.”
“The scientists we have are the best in the world,” he told another.
“The Titanic is lost and we’re going to find her.”
One young reporter posed a blunt, if impolite, accusation: “You’re in this for the money.”
Grimm hesitated, then cracked a smile.
“Partly,” he admitted.
He boarded the Gyre and settled into his cabin. As Grimm unpacked, William Hoffman, the writer on board who had been hired to chronicle the expedition, poked his head in with a more candid question for Grimm. After all the anticipation, the bold promises, and the assumption of success up to and including the bottles of champagne chilling in the ship’s icebox, what would happen if they didn’t find the ship?
Grimm turned the thought over for a moment.
“I’ll probably kill myself,” he said.
By the second day, much of the crew was seasick. The chef served fatty pork chops he thought would harden the stomachs of everyone on board. But the waves of the North Atlantic were unmoved by the gesture. Grimm passed from cabin to cabin, gripping banisters, to check on his moaning companions. Barely thirty hours had passed, and the ship’s radio had received eight calls from media organizations asking if Grimm had found the Titanic.
Grimm agreed with the scientists on a search grid that put the prior summer’s fourteen sites at the center of a large rectangle. The area was at the base of the continental slope of Newfoundland, where earlier sonar readings from the U.S. Navy had revealed a complicated landscape. The depths in the rectangle ranged from eleven thousand feet to thirteen thousand feet, and the area was bisected by a marine canyon that was a quarter mile at its skinniest and a mile and a half at its widest. The distance between the canyon floor and the rim was as little as sixty feet in some spots and as much as six hundred in others. Finding a needle in a haystack was too generous a comparison. This was like looking for a penny on the moon.
The uneven terrain underscored the considerable advantage of knowing exactly where the ship sank. If it had gone down a hundred miles farther east, the Titanic would have sunk to the continental shelf in little more than five hundred feet of water. If it had sunk a hundred miles farther south, it would be more than three miles deep in a sunken valley. Towing a sonar rig required knowing these variations, but this was based on old data, which didn’t account for massive flows of sediment from the Greenland and Labrador currents, which were known to alter the seafloor in a matter of months, if not days.
The reality that both the seafloor and the sea surface were in constant motion meant that it was almost impossible to return to the exact fourteen sites from the summer of ’80, and even if they could, and even if they found the ship, it was still likely they wouldn’t be able to pinpoint it exactly. The crew traded stories about a Spanish galleon that sank less than a mile offshore from Tampa, Florida, in two hundred feet of water. A salvage crew found it late in the day, so they fixed its position with detailed sight lines from landmarks on shore, but when they returned—and a dozen more times after that—they never found the ship again. Grimm and the crew brimmed with confidence that they’d be able to thread these geographic needles, but anyone remotely familiar with the factors at play had to concede in their quiet moments that there was a high likelihood the Titanic might never be found.
* * *
Even on an exciting mission to the site of the most famous wreck to solve one of the biggest mysteries, the overwhelming sensation aboard the Gyre was boredom. It would take at least three days to cross half of the Atlantic and arrive at the site. Making matters worse, a storm hit the Gyre east of New York. Wind gusts and bursts of water kept everyone in the galley with little to do but eat, sleep, and play cards.
Grimm rationalized the cost of the expedition on the video content he would gather. That meant that as long as there was no discovery, nothing was too mundane to be filmed.
“To make it true to life, we should show you winning,” someone said to Grimm as he and a group of scientists played a game of five-card draw.
“That’s all right,” said Grimm. “It’ll be true enough.”
“I think Grimm has four of a kind,” someone else said during one hand.
“Do you know what the odds are against that?” another player asked.
“Odds don’t apply to this character.”
During more downtime, Grimm, ever the gambler, suggested the thirty-member crew create an “informal lottery” on which of the fourteen sites would be the discovery site. Grimm divided a map of the search area in grid lines and told everyone to put their name in a square.
One of the Scripps scientists picked site 13, where images from the earlier summer showed a linear object about the length of a ship.
A cameraman selected number 10, where three objects cast shadows along the wall of the canyon.
Mary Linzer from Scripps, one of the few female scientists on board, picked site 7, where a possible field of debris appeared to measure eight hundred by two hundred fifty feet, an extremely rough approximation of the ship.
When the rest of the scientists refused to play on account of not wanting to “root” for a specific outcome, Grimm upped the stakes. Whoever picked the winning square, he said, would win a weekend in Las Vegas on his dime.
Before arriving at the search rectangle, no member of the science crew wanted to be on night watch. But once the search began, virtually everyone volunteered to stay awake all night in the ship’s lab, where news of the discovery would be confirmed first.
This made it imperative that the film crew be awake around the clock and ready for “the moment,” as though an assumption made from grainy photographs would be immediately followed by balloons and confetti. During the day this meant capturing scenes of waves crashing over the boat, “the fish” being released into the water, and then being pulled up again. At night they trained their cameras on the sonar monitors and the steely gaze of whoever was looking at them, usually Grimm or the head scientist, Fred Spiess.
On day three, when the “fish” was fully extended and dragged over site 6, a spot that the prior year had shown a ship-shaped object, the magnetometer did nothing.
The same thing happened a few hours later over site 13, the object that cast a rectangular shadow.
No one was surprised when site 7 was a dud, but everyone felt the disappointment when site 1, Grimm’s pick, registered a flat line on the instruments.
“Like a dead man’s heartbeat,” someone put it.
Sites 6 and 10 were ruled out too, which rounded out the list of high-priority sites.
People were sick with disappointment, but mostly, they were just sick. The storm from New York hadn’t flagged for several days and the ferocious rocking of the boat and the Niagara Falls–level gushers of water left everyone wishing they were back on land. Reports came over the radio of nearby ships that had lost people overboard. Twice the Gyre’s captain, a man named Don Armand, considered abandoning the search to go help the other vessels in need. Everyone knew that the North Atlantic was a historically deadly shipping route, underscored most vividly by the folklore of the Titanic. But few truly understood how dramatic it still was. In February 1982, several months after the Gyre’s expedition and not far from where they were searching, the world’s biggest oil rig, the Ocean Ranger, capsized, killing eighty-four. A day and a half later, a Russian cargo ship, the Mekhanik Tarasov, sank too, killing thirty-six.
By day six, the earlier lighthearted camaraderie on board began to transform into a sense of fatalism and disappointment. Hardened stomachs had turned the mood sour. The camera crew began to blame the scientists for wasting time, and the scientists grumbled that Grimm’s paparazzi operation was a circus. The initial symbiosis of science and entertainment had dissolved into resentful attitudes that the “other” side was the reason for the lack of progress.
Two days later, cliques began to form at different tables during the meals. People slept in and missed breakfast. While the control room had been packed during the drags over earlier sites, hardly anyone showed up for sites 11 and 12. During the launch of an inflatable zodiac boat to try to get some underwater footage, one of the scientists misjudged her water entry and almost got her leg chopped off by the boat’s motor. Then a part of the “fish” broke and had to be whittled back into place. Nothing seemed to be going right. They were also running out of time.
Scanning the ocean floor didn’t turn up nothing. Photographs taken during a long run through a canyon basin—an area that a Canadian marine geologist would later name Titanic Canyon—showed a cannon barrel, an air duct, a length of pipe, and a piece of metal the size of a king bed. But even if one assumed these were bread crumbs leading to the Titanic itself, there was no way to prove it. The cannon and the pipe could have been from any of the hundreds of ships that sank over thousands of years over one of the world’s most trafficked maritime routes. Searching an empty desert would be easy. The bottom of the sea was full of so much junk from so many eras that you were just as likely to find a Viking ax as a color TV.
Grimm’s crew was running into a familiar dilemma for wreck hunters who start their search hoping to find any sign of human life and are quickly overwhelmed by how much human garbage is down there. There are artifacts like old carvings, jewelry, or ceramic china. But there are far more aluminum cans, fuel containers, or broken bottles that no one would ever want. Today, a Japanese agency keeps a detailed database of underwater debris, categorizing every tire, soup can, and wine bottle it has found underwater all over the planet. But that’s only what’s visible; most isn’t. A debris-tracking program run by NOAA and the University of Georgia estimates more than eight million tons of trash get added to the oceans every year. And that’s a low estimate. Three studies in 2015 calculated there were more than five trillion pieces of debris in the ocean. Some of it floats, but eventually, it sinks, which explains how there could be four billion man-made objects per square kilometer in the deep sea, most of it single-use items like soda bottles or plastic grocery bags, both of which have been observed in the deepest parts of the seven-mile-deep Mariana Trench.
