Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Iron-Eating Bug Is Gobbling Up the Titanic

Posted by kdawson on from the give-'em-a-little-arsenic-and-look-what-happens dept.

gambit3 writes "A newly discovered microbe dubbed Halomonas titanicae is chewing its way through the wreck of the Titanic and leaving little behind except a fine dust, researchers report in the International Journal of Systematic and Evolutionary Microbiology. 'In 1995, I was predicting that Titanic had another 30 years,' said Henrietta Mann, a civil engineering adjunct professor at Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia. 'It's deteriorating much faster than that now.'"

22 of 221 comments (clear)

  1. It's the Only Way to Be Sure by eldavojohn · · Score: 5, Funny

    I say we surface and nuke the entire site from sea level. It's the only way to be sure those bugs don't attack our buildings and transportation. If they make it out of there, it'll be 9/11 times a hundred.

    --
    My work here is dung.
    1. Re:It's the Only Way to Be Sure by o'reor · · Score: 3, Funny

      You're right, especially after 2012 when all your buildings and transportation will be below sea level.

      --
      In Soviet Russia, our new overlords are belong to all your base.
  2. No more sailing... by khr · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Well, it's not like it was going to sail again... So, it's the natural order of things, no great loss...

    1. Re:No more sailing... by Stele · · Score: 5, Funny

      Especially since it didn't have any sails to begin with.

    2. Re:No more sailing... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

      Why would the Prime Minister of Britain be (re)releasing a movie?

  3. Afterlife refuge by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    Ever since I saw the movie as a teenager, I have looked forward to the day that I die and become a ghost, so that I may travel down to the wreckage and meditate amid the sadness of loss and the elegance of a finer age. Reading this I am completely lost. I have always believed that no ability to move through time comes with the afterlife, as otherwise ghosts from the future would have already influenced the present (however rare ghost-to-man interactions may be).

    Tell me why can this microbe exist to destroy?

    1. Re:Afterlife refuge by camperdave · · Score: 5, Insightful

      >

      Instead I just won't post anonymously and ponder why Slashdots "no posting and modding the same thread" rule exists only to destroy the contributions I could have made to this discussion.

      That's the primary reason I gave up moderating. I only read the stories that are of interest to me, modding along the way. Invariably I'd run across a post that I'd want to comment upon, and voila, a dilemma: Hold back my comment and leave the mod points in play, or comment on a posting and wipe out all of the mod points.

      --
      When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
  4. Other sunken ships by Senes · · Score: 4, Interesting

    What about surveying sites like the battle of Midway for bugs like this? It could probably yield some very interesting information.

  5. What will they eat... by snookerhog · · Score: 3, Interesting

    when they run out of titanic? These things did not evolve to just eat the titanic. What is their usual diet other than shipwrecks?

    1. Re:What will they eat... by kae_verens · · Score: 4, Interesting

      it's possible that they /did/ evolve just to eat the titanic. Maybe there were some microbes that ate some other iron-filled delicacy, and happened across this gluttonous feast. over the next thousands/millions of generations, the microbes then evolved to specifically eat the titanic - I mean, why bother struggling to find food elsewhere when you're right at the feast table?

      and what happens when the titanic is gone? they die. maybe a few will survive, but any that have specialised to eat the hull will most likely not be able to eat anything else.

  6. Propellers by dunezone · · Score: 4, Informative

    When it all turns to iron dust the propellers will still be there as their 100% manganese bronze and will must likely be buried before they fall.

    1. Re:Propellers by Wiarumas · · Score: 3, Funny

      Some call it dust, but others, like myself, call it poo.

      --
      I will bend like a reed in the wind.
  7. Rust Monsters? O noes! by sticks_us · · Score: 3, Funny

    All you fighters better turn in your plate mail, shields, and swords, and switch classes.

    Might I suggest thief or magic-user?

    --
    "Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct, not tried it." -- Donald Knuth
  8. High Salinity Levels for Halomonas by eldavojohn · · Score: 4, Informative
    From Microbewiki on Halomonas:

    Because Halomonas species are typically halophiles, they are usually found in water sources with high salinity levels, such as the Dead Sea and even within the frigid waters of Antarctica.

    In the paper you can see where this bug sits in the phylogenetic tree.

    I'm guessing the Midway Atoll has warmer water but you might find different microbes. I guess I'm more curious if the researchers think this bug already existed or if it was a neighboring microbe in the phylogenetic tree that colonized titanic and prospered, mutating slowly to what it is today -- accustomed to the iron of the wreck? If you drop anything with high surface area into the ocean and check it out fifty years later, it might be the norm to find some microbe busily breaking it down with a slight twist ...

    --
    My work here is dung.
    1. Re:High Salinity Levels for Halomonas by raddan · · Score: 4, Interesting

      Your "high salinity" in Antarctica quote made me wonder why Antarctic waters would have higher salinity than, say, tropical waters near large landmasses, where there would presumably be lots of runoff. I found this salinity map of the oceans, which is quite surprising to me. The Atlantic is quite saline. Any oceanographers out there who can explain why salinity is distributed this way? I would expect the most saline areas to be near the tropics, and the least saline to be near the poles where you find melting ice and lower dissolving capacity of water (can you tell I'm not a chemist?). Also, not surprisingly, it seems that salinity is not evenly distributed from the top of the ocean to the bottom. Given that the Titanic in on the bottom of arctic waters, one would think that you wouldn't find Halomonas there.

    2. Re:High Salinity Levels for Halomonas by crunchygranola · · Score: 5, Informative

      ... The Atlantic is quite saline. Any oceanographers out there who can explain why salinity is distributed this way? I would expect the most saline areas to be near the tropics, and the least saline to be near the poles where you find melting ice and lower dissolving capacity of water (can you tell I'm not a chemist?). ...

      You have the arctic ice thing exactly backwards - the predominant process producing ice in the arctic is not glacier calving, but the formation of sea-ice through freezing. This process locks up freshwater and thus drives up the salinity. The other thing is that after the descending air circulation near the poles dumps its moisture as snow, it is really dry, and is it moves south along the surface it is both warming and picking up moisture further driving up the salinity, and the enclosed basin of the North Atlantic tends to traps the saline water thus formed.

      The saline water does escape the North Atlantic of course, by sinking to the bottom (forming the North Atlantic Deep Water, NADW) and flowing south. This drives the very important global thermohaline circulation system.

      --
      Second class citizen of the New Gilded Age
  9. Then we do need to raise the Titanic. by Apuleius · · Score: 5, Interesting

    The hull of the Titanic is made of pre-1945 steel. The bessemer process for making steel makes it absorb radioactive isotopes from the air, and so steel that was put throught the process before the first open air atom bomb tests is valuable for uses such as Geiger counters.

  10. I've got relatives down there by Qubit · · Score: 4, Insightful

    While I'm totally supportive of reasonable scientific expeditions down to see the wreckage, I am rather amused that the ship will eventually just dissolve away. At some point it all just turns to dust and gets recycled by the planet into new things. Even the physical object that we want to be most immutable -- the 1kg reference mass in France -- is beyond our ability to keep pristine. But there's no shame in that, for we are but mere mortals, muddling our way through the mysteries of the universe on our little, watery planet.

    In the end, it seems like a fitting and dignified end to the ship and to all of the souls who went down on her.

    --

    coding is life /* the rest is */
    1. Re:I've got relatives down there by cobrausn · · Score: 3, Informative

      And now we're trying to save the internet so future generations can be exposed to how stupid we were.

      --
      How does it feel to be a liar with pants constantly on fire?
  11. Maybe not: by Hartree · · Score: 3, Interesting

    There's still a good bit of such iron around from the German fleet that was scuttled at Scapa Flow after WW1.

    Ssh! Don't tell the microbes, or they'll hitch a ride on a passing container ship and gobble that up too.

  12. For once.. by Nukenbar · · Score: 3, Funny

    I guess Iron man is not the answer to the problem.

  13. Might be useful by deadhammer · · Score: 3, Interesting

    This is a potentially useful bit of microbiology. Eventually we're going to have to clean up landfill sites and the like, so what would be more useful than a bug that strips all the iron out of a pile of stuff and deposits it in sediment? Scoop garbage into tanks, let the bugs do their work, collect the sludge at the bottom for processing. If we could engineer these bacteria to eat other stuff like copper or various types of plastic, we could potentially reclaim a lot of what we call "garbage" on the cheap. As for the Titanic? Well it's been almost a century now, I think it's time to let the old girl go.

    --
    I'll be honest, we're throwing science against the wall to see what sticks. -Cave Johnson