- The Titanic sank in 1912, and ever since people have wanted to salvage it.
- There are many reasons why the ship cannot be raised.
- Over 1,500 people died when it sank; it's considered a gravesite. The ship is also deteriorating.
Since the Titanic sank in 1912, people have been imagining ways to raise it from the bottom of the seafloor.
"But it will never come out," Daniel Stone wrote in "Sinkable: Obsession, the Deep Sea, and the Shipwreck of the Titanic." "Not only is the exposed steel on the upper bow too brittle for even the most industrious crane operation, but the mud has also acted as deep-sea quicksand for longer than most humans have been alive."
Its lack of structural integrity is just one of three main reasons why the Titanic is destined to remain sunk forever.
1. The Titanic wreck site is a gravesite
Approximately 1,500 people lost their lives in the sinking of the Titanic. After the ship sank, boats recovered over 300 bodies. Others wearing life jackets may have been swept further from the site by currents while others went down with the ship.
The US government and Britain have agreed to treat the wreck as a memorial site. "NOAA recognizes the Titanic wreck site as a maritime memorial and supports Article 4(1) of the 'Agreement Concerning the Shipwrecked Vessel R.M.S. Titanic'," which states that the site will be preserved, not salvaged, Monica Allen, NOAA Research's director of public affairs, told Insider in an email.
In 2020, RMS Titanic Inc., which owns the salvage rights to the ship, planned to retrieve the radio used to make distress calls. The plan stirred up a debate over the possibility the expedition could disturb human remains. Some argued animals and saltwater have completely decomposed the bodies, according to CBS News.
"I've seen zero human remains," James Cameron, the director who's visited the site dozens of times, told The New York Times in 2012.
For some, the wreck is a marker of the tragedy, regardless of whether there are remains. Many descendants of those who died consider it a gravesite. In 1987, Titanic survivor Eva Hart referred to those salvaging the site as "fortune hunters, vultures, pirates."
2. The Titanic wreckage is deteriorating
The Titanic ship was built out of thousands of 1-inch-thick steel plates and two million steel and wrought iron rivets, according to a report in Materials Today.
Halomonas titanicae, bacteria named for the ship, are "working symbiotically to eat, if you will, the iron and the sulfur," microbial biologist Lori Johnston told USA Today.
As bacteria consume the ship's iron, they form what is called rusticles, which look like stalactites covering the ship.
The rusticles are "a much weaker form of the metal," that are fragile enough to turn to dust, Clare Fitzsimmons, from Newcastle University, told the BBC in 2019. The ocean currents and salt corrosion have also caused damage over time.
The extent of the Titanic's deterioration is obvious if you compare images of Captain Edward Smith's quarters from 1996 and 2019.
"Captain's bathtub is a favorite image among the Titanic enthusiasts, and that's now gone," Titanic historian Parks Stephenson said in a statement in 2019. "That whole deck hole on that side is collapsing, taking with it the staterooms, and the deterioration is going to continue advancing."
3.
The cost of raising the Titanic would be enormous
Ambitious Titanic enthusiasts have been dreaming up ways to raise the ship since 1914, when engineer Charles Smith devised a plan to attach electromagnetic cables to the hull and slowly raise it with steam engines and winches, according to "Sinkable."
At the time, he estimated the cost would be $1.5 million — that's roughly $45 million today.
Raising the capsized cruise ship the Costa Concordia in 2013 cost $800 million, The Atlantic reported. That ship was only partially submerged, so bringing up the Titanic would be far more complex and costly.
A piece of the Titanic on land
While the site is a memorial site some artifacts from the wreck have been salvaged. Any salvaging of the site is limited to the debris field around the two hulls and must comply with the NOAA guidelines, international agreement, and federal regulations.
That said, exposing the Titanic to the air comes with its own problems for the ship.
For example, it took two attempts, the first in 1996 and the second two years later, to haul what's known as the "big piece" of the Titanic to the surface. The 13-by-30-foot, 15-ton hull section still had rivets and glass in some of the bronze portholes, according to SF Gate.
The seafloor is a low-oxygen environment, so the piece had to go back into the water during transport to slow the corrosion process. Eventually, the hull piece soaked in an above-ground pool filled with a solution of sodium carbonate and water for 20 months to remove salts that were weakening the metal, according to the book "Cleaning Techniques in Conservation Practice: A Special Issue of the Journal of Architectural Conservation."
The big piece is currently on display at the Luxor Hotel in Las Vegas. It's probably the closest most people will come to seeing the Titanic above the waves.