Did you know the Titanic is slowly disappearing? It’s been over a hundred years since the Titanic, steaming at over 20 knots in the dark in fog in a known iceberg area of the North Atlantic Ocean, glanced off the side of one of those bergs, and after staying afloat for about two hours and forty minutes, sank in two main pieces, to the bottom of the ocean. For a long time it lay there undiscovered until 1985 when it was finally located by Robert Ballard. He explored the ship and took a lot of now-iconic pictures.
The ship was easily recognizable at the time, but now, some 30+ years after its discovery, it has begun to disintegrate. Of course, you say, it has been resting 3.8 km (about 2 miles) down at the bottom of the North Atlantic. Why wouldn’t it disintegrate? All that salt water. But one important factor in the destruction of the Titanic is not simply corrosion due to salt water, but the presence of a special bacterium called Halomonas titanicae. This bacteria is eating away at the iron of the ship (and there’s a lot of iron in that ship) and soon, within thirty to forty years by some estimates, it will be gone, and nothing will be left but an iron stain on the sea floor where the ship once lay. The ship will enter history as a mere memory, with only pictures and images to remind us of the folly of one of mankind’s dumbest ship voyages.
Personally, I have to say I like the fact that a bacteria is eating the Titanic. It’s a reminder of the impermanence of man-made things. If we can build ships of iron that are eventually destroyed by nothing more than a simple life-form, we can find bacteria that will devour almost anything. There must be bacteria out there that can destroy plastics, too. And oil spills. Humankind will almost certainly not be on this planet forever. We may go somewhere else, or we may die out and be replaced by—well, use your imagination. In its fifty to seventy-five thousand year existence on this planet, Homo sapiens has built a hell of a lot of structures and other items of questionable quality (buildings, roads, dams, bridges, etc.) and after we leave, those items will eventually return to the soil from which they were made. I find it refreshing that the Earth will return to a natural state. It’s an illustration that Mother Nature is far more in control of the evolution of this world than we are. I would hate to be a part of a civilization that leaves remnants of its handiwork as a permanent scar on such a lovely planet.
So, I will state for the record, here and now, that I am glad that the Earth has developed a bacteria that can perform this transformation, and I wonder what others out there are waiting for their turn to get in on the feast. In a thousand years, the Empire State Building, to use an obvious example, will almost certainly no longer exist. Will its iron structure be similarly digested? Let’s hope so.