#titanic wreck

[listen-to-the-inner-walrus]

so theres a lot of posts going round about the titanic wreck and the missing submarines; all of them that ive seen have made very good points about how shoddy the submersible seemed to be and how the company decided to wait eight hours before reporting it, and how this is a play stupid games, win stupid prizes for the ultra-wealthy who paid like 250grand a ticket for this thing.

but what i havent seen any posts about is how the titanic wreck is a gravesite and this tourism is disturbing the graves of over 1500 people.

sometimes its kinda hard to remember that those on the titanic were real people; it was over a century ago, the story has been romanticised in so many ways (like the movie), theres conspiracies theories galore that cloud everything with misinformation, but at the end of the day, those who died were real people.

do you want their names? heres a list of them; its a long read. and for fun, heres another site where you can see photos of the children and babies who died aboard.

their bodies are long gone and their lives long forgotten. all we have to remember them and honour them is the wreck itself. its all we have of them and it is their gravesite. its their tombstone.

caitlin doughty/ask a morticians video on the great lakes discusses the topic well, and why we should leave these shipwrecks alone because again, they are the gravesites of all the souls who died aboard those ships. we rarely have bodies to recover so we really are left just with the wreck.

and what really upsets me about titanic tourism is how the majority of those who died that night were not the ultra-wealthy rich folks you might picture when you think of ocean liners.

61% of the first class passengers survived

42% of the second class passengers survived

24% of the third class passengers survived

24% of the crew survived **

the majority of those who died that night were regular folk; not to be cliche, but they were just like us. titanics wreck is not only a gravesite for over 1500 people, its also a majority working class gravesite.

and look at us now. look at what were doing. the ultra-wealthy can pay the equivalent of peanuts to them to disturb a mass gravesite of the exact kind of people they exploit today to hold onto all their wealth. 

its easy to point and laugh at these dumb idiots in their playstation controller submarine, seemingly held together with super glue and duct tape, but its also important to remember that what they were doing was simply disturbing a gravesite for fun. though the company does research, these guys werent down there to conduct research, they were there so they could brag about it to their friends. its like “climbing mount everest” while your sherpa does all the work.

if you cant tell, i have a lot of feelings about this. shipwrecks and ocean liners are one of my special interests and im currently building a (beginner’s) model of the titanic, for fucks sake. but i would never go down to see that wreck because its a fucking gravesite and we should not be disturbing their final resting place.

[paddysnuffles]

Part of why I'm glad the sub never made it to the Titanic

One of the things that I feared about the Oceangate trip was that they’d break with tradition regarding the engine room.

You see, since the first expedition to the wreck, it has been considered absolutely taboo to go near it.

This is because the engineers volunteered to stay behind to keep the lights going as long as possible to make it more likely that help would arrive on time. As a way of showing respect for those men who knowingly chose to die to help others, their area of the ship is considered taboo for exploration.

And I sincerely doubt that the Oceangate dudebros would have cared about keeping up the tradition of respecting the sacrifice of those men.

[bebx]

I promise you not everything has to be made into memes. basic human empathy is a good thing, some of y’all should try that.

[dinodude52]

Okay, let's talk about the Titanic

Because I'm autistic and the Titanic was one of my special interests as a kid and that submersible has reignited my interest a little bit.

There were enough lifeboats. The controversy about the lifeboats came from the fact that the original designers wanted more lifeboats, but they downsized the number of boats to clear up the deck. There were regulations in place to ensure there were enough boats on all White Star Line ships. With the few collapsible boats they included on the ship, they had enough boats. The problem was they didn't fill them properly during the evacuation. Edit: I say there were enough lifeboats but I doublechecked and realized I miss remembered. The Titanic was equipped with the legally required number of lifeboats at 20 (16 on deck and 4 collapsible). The assumption had been that, in the even of an emergency, they would have the ability to be rescued fairly quickly and the lifeboats could be used to carry people to safety on repeated trips. Unfortunately, the closest ships were still too far away. The Carpathia was the rescue ship despite being further away than the closest ship to the Titanic, the Californian.

"Women and children first" wasn't the norm for shipwrecks. Typically, women and children made up the majority of the dead during such tragedies. To my knowledge, only two shipwrecks have done "women and children first," and they are most definitely the exceptions, not the rule.

On that note, one of the reasons the lifeboats weren't filled properly was because the crew on one side of the ship interpreted Captain Smith's command as "women and children first" while the crew on the other side of the ship interpreted the command as "women and children only."

The majority of the dead were third class passengers. Some did survive, but the majority didn't.

There were also a number of dogs that perished on the ship, though some did survive.

The ship wasn't going any faster than it was supposed to.

As for the ice field, they were skirting the bottom edge of said ice field. Where they were passing through, the icebergs were supposed to be pretty small.

The iceberg the Titanic collided with was unusually large for that time of year and for the location it was floating in. The weather conditions of the time made the ocean much colder than usual so the iceberg didn't have the chance to melt as much as it could have.

Though the lookouts didn't have binoculars, the sky was clear and the ocean was calm that night. If there was an iceberg, by all accounts they would have been able to see it, though it's suspected that the calm seas might have actually been a hinderance to spotting the iceberg rather than the help the lookouts assumed it would be.

On the topic of spotting the iceberg, recent research suggests that due to some atmospheric weirdness, the horizon line looked higher than it actually was. I don't remember the specifics, but it had something to do with the calm ocean and warm air from the south mingling with cool air from the north. It was also an exceptionally cold night that night, according to survivors, which might have aided the optical illusion. With the horizon looking higher than it was, the iceberg would have either looked smaller and further away than it was, or it could have been hidden completely.

The way the Titanic was built, it was explicitly designed to take damage head-on rather than from the sides. If the ship had stayed course instead of turning, it would have survived. It would have taken significant damage, but it would have stayed afloat.

The rivets used to connect the steel plates on the side of the Titanic were made of iron, I think, and an impure iron at that. The iron became brittle from the cold water so when the iceberg scraped against the side of the Titanic, the seams ripped apart like a zipper. The rivets failed completely.

The survivors of the wreck reported seeing the Titanic break in half, but no one believed them (probably because many of the survivors were women). It wasn't until the wreckage was found that the truth was known: the Titanic broke in half.

Though the lifeboats did their best to stay in a group, a few boats ended up floating away. The bodies were recovered some time later. Many retrieval efforts were dispatched over a handful of weeks after the tragedy. They were never able to recover all the bodies, and I think they only managed to recover about 100 out of 1500 bodies, give or take. They took the bodies back to Halifax in Canada where the Titanic was supposed to dock first. There's a memorial there and the unclaimed bodies have been buried there as well.

If there were bodies trapped inside the Titanic as it was sinking, there weren't any bodies once it hit the bottom of the ocean. And there definitely weren't any bodies when the wreckage was found in the 80's. The pressure would have destroyed them, bacteria and deep sea creatures would have eaten whatever was left. They would have decomposed.

As they were attempting to recover the bodies, a search and rescue team did find the iceberg the Titanic hit. They knew it was the true iceberg because it still had paint from the hull on it.

I went to the Titanic museum in Orlando once a long time ago and it was wonderful in a tragic way. My favorite part of the tour was a small section where the deck was recreated, including a bench you could sit at and a wall covered in black cloth and lights to look like stars. It was cool, but not cold, and was set to replicate the night of the disaster. Sitting on the bench, you could really feel what it was like to be on the Titanic the night it sank. The next room you entered was a room with a piece of the hull, and then after that another room filled with the names of everyone on the ship. If the name was lit, the person lived, but if it wasn't, the person died. You got a card with information about a real passenger at the beginning of the tour and in that final room you learned if your passenger survived or not. I still have my card somewhere, but I'm not sure where. I can't remember the name of the passenger on my card (this was 7 or 8 yrs ago by now) but he was a third class passenger, one of the few who survived, and unfortunately his wife and all his children perished. The panels with the names were set up by class, and the most heartbreaking part was seeing the panels with the third class passengers and how many names weren't lit.

And those are my Titanic facts. IDK what it is about this ship, about this wreck, that captures our imaginations in such an intense way. I used to check this book out of the school library about the Titanic and read it over and over again. I was obsessed. Still am, apparently.

Note: This was all from my memory so if my facts aren’t quite right, I apologize. It’s been *years* since I’ve gone down a proper Titanic rabbit hole.

[garthnadermemestash]

The internet remains undefeated

[existennialmemes]

Can't stop thinking about the endless resources we had to look for 5 rich people who were mostly likely dead before we even started looking.

But no one would step up to rescue literally hundreds of refugees last week, who we knew for sure were alive at the time. Refugees that would've been super easy to save comparatively.

This is literally what's wrong with the world. 5 rich people who made a colossally bad decision just for funsies were deemed more newsworthy and rescue worthy, than the refugees fleeing war.

And this is just one example. They're also deemed more rescue worthy than the victims of natural disasters, history has demonstrated that pretty clearly, over and over again.

Whether it's bad investments or lawsuits or hurling themselves to the bottom of the fucking ocean, there is always money to rescue rich people from the consequences of their unchecked hedonism.

But never enough to feed or clothe or house or in any way care for the poor.

This is why I won't apologize for laughing at the rich people for dying.

Normally their shortsighted negligence only kills the rest of us. It's cathartic to see it go the other way.

[oceanlinersmodeller]

Titanic bow wreck speed painting study - warm up sketch.

[aqours]

you actually can't make this shit up everyone you really genuinely cannot make up this level of narcissism and arrogance

[thanos-the-dad-titan]

This book seems so fitting with the clusterfuck happening down by the Titanic...

[thepastisalreadywritten]

American financier Jay Bloom offered 'last minute' discounted price to sit in doomed Titan submersible with his son - but he turned it down over safety concerns

An American tycoon has revealed a text exchange with submersible chief executive Stockton Rush, who tried to convince he and his young son to pay for a reduced six-figure seat to see the Titanic by telling him: "It was safer than crossing the street."

By David Wu

June 24, 2023

An American tycoon has revealed how submersible chief executive Stockton Rush tried to convince he and his son to buy two tickets on the doomed Titan vessel.

Financier Jay Bloom shared the text exchange with Mr Rush months before the CEO died with four other passengers when the craft suffered a "catastrophic implosion."

He tried to offer his friend a "last minute price" of $AUD225,000, with the original cost of the seat valued about $365,000 in April for an expedition the following month.

The first messages started as far back as February, when the chief executive wondered if there was an interest to see the famous shipwreck in the Atlantic Ocean.

Mr Bloom said his son Sean had been "put a little scare in him" after one of his friends researched the dangers of travelling in deep waters.

"I'm happy to have a video call with him. Curious what the uninformed would say the danger is and whether it's real or imagined," Mr Rush responded.

The financier said his son was worried about "perceived threats to the vessel," such as a sperm whale or a giant squid attack compromising Titan's hull.

"Yeah, very stupid. The pressure is over 100 million pounds. No sperm whale or squid is ever going to be able to mess with the sub," Mr Rush replied.

"While there's obviously risk, it's way safer than flying in a helicopter or even scuba diving. There hasn't been even an injury in 35 years in a non-military subs."

Three days later, Mr Rush would again try to reassure Mr Bloom and his son by sending a link to how deep sperm whales can go underwater.

Mr Bloom said he was not concerned about being eaten by a whale and decided to set up a Skype call, so his questions could be answered properly.

There would be limited text communication before Mr Rush sent a message on April 24, offering discounted tickets to see the Titanic wreck.

"Have a space on mission 1 (may 11-19) and 2 (may 20-28). Last minute price is $150k pp," the chief executive advised.

Mr Bloom said he would have to check his schedule to see if he could fit it in, as Mr Rush asked three days later: "Any luck?"

That trip would be later postponed to June 18 due to weather conditions.

Mr Bloom shared the messages to his Facebook page.

The financier even met face-to-face on March 1 with Mr Rush, who took him through the Titanic Exhibit at Luxor in Las Vegas before having lunch at a food court.

"He was absolutely convinced it was safer than crossing the street," Mr Bloom said on the post about his interactions with the creator of Titan.

Mr Rush also gave him a limited edition of a book of photos signed by him and French mariner Paul-Henri Nargeolet, 77, who was also aboard the submersible.

Mr Bloom advised he could not join them on the once-in-a-lifetime trip until 2024.

Their tickets were later sold to prominent Pakistani businessman Shahzada Dawood and his 19-year-old son Suleman, the latter who was "terrified" to go.

The fifth person was adventurer and British billionaire Hamish Harding.

The five men entered Titan and started their 3,800m journey down to the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean on Sunday morning.

However, less than two hours into the trip, mothership Polar Prince lost contact with the roughly six-metre long vessel, which sparked a large-scale international search.

The United States Coast Guard on Thursday (local time) confirmed pieces of debris found near the Titanic wreck belonged to the missing submersible.

"An ROV subsequently found additional debris, in consultation with experts from within the unified command, the debris is consistent with the catastrophic loss of the pressure chamber (of Titan)," Coast Guard Rear Admiral John Mauger told reporters.

Undersea expert Paul Hanken said five major different pieces of debris had led experts to conclude they were the remains of the OceanGate Expeditions craft.

"The initial thing we found was a nose cone, which was outside of the (Titan) pressure hull. We then found a large debris field and within that large debris field we found the front and back of the pressure hull," he said to reporters.

"Shortly thereafter, we found a second, smaller debris field and within that debris field we found the other end of the pressure hull.

"(It) ultimately contained the totality of that pressure vehicle. That was our first indication that there was a catastrophic event."

It was revealed the US Navy had detected an "anomaly consistent with implosion or explosion" where Titan was reported missing hours after the sub departed.

The Transportation Safety Board (TSB) of Canada announced on Friday (local time) it has launched an investigation, as Polar Prince was a Canadian-flagged ship.

A team of investigators will travel to St Johns in Canada's Newfoundland and Labrador where they will "gather information and conduct interviews."

It will also coordinate its operation with other agencies.

TSB will provide updates throughout the investigation.

[listen-to-the-inner-walrus]

since theres a lot of discussions about shipwrecks and deep sea submersibles happening right now, im just gonna quickly recommend this video which details how caladan oceanic found the samuel b roberts.

the samuel b roberts was a destroyer escort sank during the battle off samar during ww2. the wreck was found last year and is 22,621 feet/6885 metres deep which is almost 10,000 feet or 3000 metres deeper than the titanic and is currently the deepest wreck ever found.

in the video, you see a deep sea submersible (which can go down to 36,000 feet/10,973 metres) that isnt a tin can finished up with duct tape, super glue and glittery gel pens. it is piloted by an expert and they swap out pilots every day to avoid exertion or fatigue, and they have a very complex sonar system for finding wrecks. the longest they can go down is 16 hours and they keep in contact with their ship above and have to get clearance just for half an hour more.

when they find the wreck, they look around it to ensure they can identify it and map it out as well as they can, and then head back up to shore. they then hold a funeral service for those who died and leave a wreath on the ocean surface above where the wreck lays.

while im somewhat sketched out by the founder victor vescovo, the company does important work in terms of furthering our understanding of the ocean and finding wrecks which are the gravesites of those who passed. and they are not disrespectful to those whose graves lay 22,000 feet/6700 metres down on the seabed.

and what i would like to point out is how the samuel b roberts is protected against unauthorised disturbance by the sunken military craft act. you would need a permit from the naval history and heritage command (and a submarine that can withstand all the pressure) to go see it.

which, as ive said many times in the last two days, is something that the titanic should also have protection against. there should be laws in place that do not allow people to treat a mass fucking gravesite as a tourist spot.

[paddysnuffles]

Why was Oceangate visiting the Titanic an issue but visiting other disaster sites isn't?: Thoughts from a Titanic nerd

Alright, as someone who’s had a special interest on the Titanic for well over 20 years, here’s my take on the Oceangate incident.

Part of why it took me so long to say something was that I felt the need to think about why the idea of the “expedition” enraged me so much. It’s not like we don’t visit disaster sites as tourists regularly. Take Pompeii and Herculaneum, for instance – as disastrous as it gets, yet no one would argue that it’s tasteless to visit those sites. So could it be just a matter of how much time has passed?

That may be an aspect of it, but there are plenty of modern disasters that we visit, such as the Frank Slide site not too far from where I live. Half a town was buried alive in 1903, with most of the victims still being under the rubble to this day. But there’s a visitor’s centre where you can see the slide site from the windows and learn about the event. 

So what gives? Why was the Oceangate trip so enraging?

And here’s the conclusion I’ve come to:

In the case of Pompeii and Herculaneum, we visit the sites of disasters that affected everyone – rich and poor, slave and master, animals and humans. And we do so to learn about the past, to see what life was like over 1,000 years ago. Because, like it or not, those sites are pristine windows into the past.

In the case of Frank Slide, we visit to learn from the mistakes of the past (the local Indigenous folk had vehemently warned white people to not build so close to Turtle Mountain, as it had a history of “moving” and white people said they were just being superstitious) as well as to remember the stories of the people who died (most of which were poor working families of miners).

Then there’s the Titanic.

Proper expeditions for study and retrieval fit into the same categories as the disasters mentioned above. When a disaster site is being disturbed in order to learn about what happened and to uncover more about the stories of the people lost in the event, disturbing the site is acceptable. It’s necessary and done with a sobering level of respect; that this isn’t about gawking at a gravesite. Note that the descendants of Titanic victims don’t typically have a problem with exploration of the site done for educational purposes, but they did have an issue with turning the site into a tourist travel spot.

Another aspect to why the Oceangate tourism trip was problematic and that breaks from the categories listed above is that the trip involved obscenely rich people going to gawk at what is primarily the resting place of thousands of poor people. Most of the Titanic survivors were rich, because the poor were kept locked in their areas while the rich were escorted to safety in half-full boats when there already weren’t enough boats to go around (more on that in a minute). If the “expedition” were for everyday people to view the site then maaaaybe it’d be acceptable. But it wasn’t. 

It was a trip for the obscenely rich to gawk at the gravesite of poor people whose deaths were largely caused by rich people repeatedly ignoring safety precautions. From the fact that the Titanic didn’t have enough lifeboats as it was (largely because the company thought they messed with the ship’s aesthetic and made the deck look cluttered) to the lookouts not having enough binoculars because they lost one of them and no one thought to bring extra or ask a passenger to borrow theirs, to ignoring iceberg warnings and still going fast despite knowing it wasn’t safe to do so, and more.

So while I feel bad for the 19-year-old who didn’t want to go in the first place, I don’t feel sorry for the others. Not even the Titanic expert. Because by being a part of this trip he was condoning both the disrespect of the dead as well as condoning the behaviour of the CEO who mocked safety regulations. And as a Titanic expert, he should have been aware that lack of safety precautions were not only the primary reason the ship sank, but also the primary reason why naval safety regulations (such as ships being required to have at least enough lifeboats for everyone on board but ideally a couple extra as a buffer) were first set in place.

[bebx]

the whole titanic situation is making me anxious because it literally took them like 73 years to find a ship THAT big and we have only about less than 30 hours left, as of now, to find that small submarine with the people in it alive.

[cu-taibhseil]

this might not be a popular opinion and i mean it with the least amount of disrespect possible, to the families of the deceased: it's okay to recognize that the oceangate situation is sad. i wish we lived in a world where people didnt die as a consequence of their actions, but sometimes that happens. if you get on a shoddily built roller coaster chasing adrenaline, or you go spelunking and get stuck in a cave trying to chart a new cave system, or you choose to eat food that has possibly gone bad and risk it. sometimes the high risk/high reward situations pay off, and sometimes we're left here - angry at a company for allowing the situation to even be an option and angry at the people who lost their lives chasing a very slim high reward.

it's also okay to recognize that it's a sad situation and still not feel sad or upset by the news. was it something they deserved? no. was it something anyone deserved? no. but was it something that could be reasonably be expected from the choices they made? unfortunately yeah. choosing to spend their money on an "experimentally designed" submersible craft, choosing to sign a waiver that basically almost guarantees bad things are going to happen when walked through the fine print, and then actually getting into the craft after being given a tour of it were all choices those people made. and it turns out the perceived reward of seeing the titanic wreck in person wasn't worth it, because they lost their lives.

but when you think of the situation: person has 250k to spend on a tourist attraction. person has a decision to make: go for the high risk but possible high reward option, or go with the option that will guarantee you get home safe after your expedition? in this case the person(s) chose the high risk but possible high reward option. when they made the choice to pick the high risk they understood the risks. they signed the waiver and they talked to the CEO and they talked to people who'd been on the craft before. they were willing to risk death to tour that shipwreck.

and to those of you who are heartbroken over the 19yo who was on board: it's objectively sad that a promising business student lost his life (presumably) trying to bond with his dad. can we spend time mourning his trust in his dad to keep him safe? yeah. but should we sit here and continually say "he was just a baby! he's a kid! he doesnt know better!" he was a business student who lived in a separate city (if not country) from his dad. he was an adult person, able to drink, drive a car, vote, fight for his country - the whole nine. it's so incredibly disrespectful to place the blame of his death entirely on his father's shoulders as if he didn't also understand the risks. i know that the prefrontal cortex isn't fully formed until a person is 25, but he had some ability to make choices and he unfortunately made the wrong one. he's a grown man who made a wrong / ill-informed choice just like his dad and the other men on the craft.

i dont understand how you can sit there and be completely heartbroken when these men talked with people who'd been on the craft before, they'd signed the waivers, they'd been somewhat informed (not to the extent they should've been and that blame sits squarely on the shoulders of the next CEO of oceangate) that the craft was "experimental" in nature and not up to par with other submersibles in the same field. presumably these men were experienced divers and had spent time in submarines. they knew some of the red flags when they'd seen them right off, and others were more hidden from them. example: a boat taking the craft out to the drop site. it's my understanding that submersibles usually leave ports because of inspection laws. the men aboard the ship would've noticed the change in protocol. they would've noticed and they chose not to care, or chose to focus on the possibility of the high reward.

while it's objectively sad that this happened, it's okay to not feel actually sad over this. the people on the craft knew it was an option from the get-go, and remember they'd weighed the risks and the rewards and they'd decided with their grown ass adult brains that the slim possibility of the reward would be worth risking their lives for. it's sad. but when it boils down to it, they made a wrong choice; they played a stupid ass game and won the worst prize of all.

[garthnadermemestash]

When memes are cheaper than rich assholes in tubes

[existennialmemes]

The reaction to the billionaire jokes is honestly so confusing. What the hell did you folks think we've been planning to use the guillotines for this whole time?