Iron-Eating Bug Is Gobbling Up the Titanic

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.'"

Comments

It's the Only Way to Be Sure

[eldavojohn]

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.

No more sailing...

[khr]

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

Re:No more sailing...

[Stele]

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

Re:No more sailing...

[Anonymous Coward]

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

Afterlife refuge

[Anonymous Coward]

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?

Re:Afterlife refuge

[camperdave]

>

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.

Then we do need to raise the Titanic.

[Apuleius]

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.

Re:High Salinity Levels for Halomonas

[crunchygranola]

... 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.