HMS Titanic is possibly the most famous shipwreck of all time. After it was discovered in the North Atlantic Ocean at an astonishing depth of 3,800 meters below sea level in 1985, visitors from all over the world flock here to see even a small piece of the hull, like what is now found at the Luxor Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas. Over the decades, many different exhibits have put visitors in the shoes of passengers so they can see what it was like to be on the Titanic, and it is clear that the fascinating impact of this tragic voyage will continue for many years to come.
So it’s no surprise that people are trying to dig the shipwreck out of the ocean’s depths, some for historical research ambitions, others for money.
The wreckage is currently protected by the UNESCO convention and therefore must remain undisturbed in its place. However, that hasn’t stopped some of the absolutely insane suggestions made throughout history about how the Titanic could be pulled out of the water.
Wreck salvage can be a big business as the salvage value is legally owned by the salvager, but ships are often very heavy and salvaging from the seafloor when they are not in shallow water is often not a viable endeavor. The age of ships brings another problem: Over time, they can become almost impossible to move due to the natural effects of water.
How are sunken ships rescued?
However, there are some options to save these shipwrecks. Buoyancy bags can be placed under the light vessels and inflated to bring the debris to the surface. In older and fragile ships like the Mary Rose, a cage is tied around the ship and then lifted to relieve stress on the structure. Finally, rescuers can disassemble the wreckage, which can then be recovered separately and reassembled.
Being about 4 kilometers deep and weighing 52,300 tons, the Titanic would probably be a bit too large for buoyancy aids and cages, and disassembly would not have come at the enormous cost it would entail as it would be a highly risky operation due to its age. That’s why some methods that are out of the ordinary have been and continue to be suggested throughout history.
Now let’s take a look at these crazy rescue ideas…
Saving the Titanic with ping pong balls
The first idea, which is difficult to say for sure whether it’s serious or not, is to lift the debris above the water using ping pong balls. While this plan collapsed with the knowledge that the wreckage of the Titanic was in two pieces instead of one, it was calculated how many ping pong balls would be needed to render the structure unsinkable when placed in the hull, assuming it was one piece. YouTuber Tom Rocks Maths provides a great summary of this calculation, but the short answer is around 1.5 billion. Unfortunately, water pressure 3.8 kilometers deep will make the balls flat and useless, but the fact that it appears even in some physics textbooks points to the existence of people who believe this plan makes sense.
Saving the Titanic with polyester bags and petroleum jelly
Another idea comes from an engineer in Stamford, Connecticut, in 1985, shortly after the Titanic was discovered, when scientists came up with any idea they could think of to salvage the wreck. The idea, featured in The Night Lives On, involves placing polyester bags on the ship’s hull and then pumping Vaseline into them, which will become hard and buoyant. These bags would then bring the debris to the surface in one piece.
Later, someone who calculated the necessary vaseline for this, found that 180,000 tons of Vaseline was needed to provide enough buoyancy to lift the huge structure. Considering the world’s largest cargo ship can carry around 120,000 tons, just getting this massive amount of Vaseline close to the Titanic would take an incredible amount of effort. Even ignoring how difficult it would be to transport all that Vaseline and pump it under the sea, the bags will likely rip off the top of the rotting metal or pop out from the exposed side as the structure begins to rise. Still, it cannot be denied that this idea is interesting.
Saving the Titanic using icebergs
Perhaps by far the best and most ironic idea is to use the icebergs that caused the Titanic to sink to resurface.
Someone named Arthur Hickey appointed himself head of the Titanic Salvage Company in hopes of reclaiming the riches buried with the Titanic before the wreck was discovered. The assets on board were then valued at around £1bn, now the equivalent of nearly £5bn. He had a dream that inspired him to ask the price of the liquid nitrogen that would be used to build an iceberg around the debris and then rise to the surface.
Hickey consulted the BOC group, an industrial gas company, to make his dream come true. In fact, this idea was checked by scientists and they found that about half a million tons of liquid nitrogen would be needed. That would have meant building a full liquid nitrogen liquefaction plant over the debris and pumping it down. And perhaps unsurprisingly, the company has decided not to do that.
Of course, the list of suggestions for saving the Titanic is not limited to these, and we can probably guess that much more crazy and different ideas will be proposed in the future. But for now, it looks like Titanic will continue its legend in stories as an unrecoverable wreck for the foreseeable future.
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