00:00There is a bacteria slowly eating the titanic. Scientists named it after the ship itself,
00:04because it lives by feeding on the wreck. In a few years, the entire ship could be gone.
00:09So why don't we just pull it up? People have proposed pouring 180,000 tons of petroleum
00:14jelly into the hull. Others suggested 3 million ping pong balls. Some even wanted to lift it with
00:19a giant magnet. It sounds like a joke, but every single idea has been seriously debated.
00:25None of them worked. And one attempt came within 60 meters of success before it all fell apart.
00:30The titanic rests 3,800 meters below the surface. If you stacked four and a half Burj Khalifa
00:36towers underwater, they would barely reach the top of the ship. A dive straight down takes two and a
00:40half hours, descending through total blackness so long you start to doubt you will ever hit the bottom.
00:44At that depth, the water pressure is 3,800 times normal. Every square centimeter bears the weight
00:50of nearly 400 kilograms. A steel cube drop there is crushed flat instantly. The pressure alone explains
00:56almost everything. To understand the scale, look at history. In 1961, Sweden raised the Vesa, a warship
01:03that had sunk in 1628, from a depth of just 32 meters. It was called the largest salvage operation
01:09ever. The deepest ship ever recovered at that time sat at only 45 meters. The titanic lies at a depth
01:15119 times greater than the Vesa. Every plan that sounds clever on the surface, pumping air, filling
01:20balloons, is meaningless under 3,800 meters of crushing pressure. The one time humans nearly did it at that
01:26depth was not about the titanic at all. In 1974, at the height of the cold war, the CIA launched
01:32a
01:32secret operation codenamed Azorium. Its goal, raise the Soviet submarine, the K-129, from 4,900 meters
01:39down in the Pacific. They hired eccentric millionaire Howard Hughes to build a cover story about deep sea
01:43mining, while secretly constructing a 180 meter salvage ship called the Glomar Explorer. The whole project
01:49cost about 4 billion dollars in today's money, the richest intelligence agency on earth, with its best
01:54engineers, doing exactly one thing, lifting a submarine off the seabag. The result? The giant
01:59mechanical claw broke apart while lifting. Two-thirds of the submarine fell back into the abyss.
02:05Four billion dollars bought back one-third of the wreckage, two nuclear torpedoes, and the bodies of
02:09six Soviet sailors. If the most powerful intelligence agency in the world could not recover a submarine
02:14from that debt, private schemes stood no chance. Pouring 180,000 tons of jelly and waiting for it to harden.
02:19The pressure would crush the bag before it ever lifted. The ping-pong idea? Three million balls
02:25could float a small boat once, in shallow water. At 3,800 meters, every single ball would be crushed
02:31to fragments. And the giant magnet? It would just tear a hole in the hull, pull away one sheet of
02:37metal,
02:37and leave the rest behind. Every plan hits the same wall, the whole ship cannot be moved. So what about
02:43taking it apart piece by piece? In 1996, an American company with exclusive salvage rights targeted one
02:49piece, a 20-ton steel plate that had broken loose from the hull, measuring four and a half by seven
02:53and a half meters. They floated it up using bags filled with diesel fuel. To recover costs, they turned
02:59the salvage into a reality show, 1,700 paying guests, some spending $186,000 each, watched on monitors aboard
03:05two ships. Survivors of the Titanic itself were present. The plate rose smoothly, until 60 meters from the
03:12surface, when the lifting cable snapped, and the 20-ton steel fell back into 3,800 meters of
03:16darkness, watched by 1,700 people. Two years later they tried again. This time it worked. That steel
03:23plate now sits in a hotel casino in Las Vegas, next to 250 other artifacts recovered from the seabed.
03:29A single plate can be saved. The whole ship cannot. And so the question changed, it is no longer how
03:35to
03:35lift it, but how long it can last. To answer that, go back to 1985. That year, oceanographer Robert
03:41Ballard went to sea as a US Navy intelligence officer. But his real mission was not the Titanic.
03:46The Navy wanted him to secretly locate two lost nuclear submarines, the fresher, sunk in 1963
03:52killing 129 men, and the Scorpion, lost in 1968 with 99 crew. Finding the Titanic was the cover story
03:58for the media. After completing the Navy mission, Ballard had only 12 days left. He had learned one
04:04thing searching for submarines, large wrecks scatter debris as they sink, forming a debris trail kilometers
04:09long. So he did not look for the ship, he looked for the debris field. Using that method, he found
04:14the Titanic in 12 days. He was also the first person to see the rustic less, the icicle-like rust
04:19formations hanging all over the wreck, and he named them. The word later entered the Oxford English
04:24Dictionary. But what Ballard did not know was that inside those rustic less lived an organism never
04:28recorded before. In 2010, microbiologist Henrietta Mann at Dalhousie University isolated it from
04:34rustical samples and named it Halomonas titanicae, a single cell bacterium. Its only food source is iron.
04:40It clings to the hull, uses iron oxide for energy, and slowly dissolves the ship layer by layer.
04:45Mann made a prediction, at the current rate, the Titanic could be completely gone by around 2030.
04:50In 2019, an expedition completed the first crewed dive in 14 years, and the 4k footage left everyone
04:56silent. The captain's bathtub, the most iconic image for Titanic fans, had disappeared.
05:0110 years earlier you could still see the white porcelain clearly, now, nothing but rust.
05:05The crow's nest, where the lookout shouted, iceberg right ahead, is gone too.
05:10The forward mast has collapsed. Historian Park Stevenson said it plainly,
05:14the Titanic is returning to nature. But it is not only nature eating it.
05:18Since the wreck was found in 1985, salvage companies and auction houses have never stopped.
05:23A single silver spoon from the ship can sell for tens of thousands of dollars.
05:27In 2020, UNESCO declared the wreck protected by an international convention.
05:31Some argue 1,500 people rest here and it should not be touched.
05:35But oceanographers who have made hundreds of dives report a stark fact,
05:38no human remains have ever been found. The environment and its creatures erased
05:42everything long ago. Some people chose to see it with their own eyes.
05:46The company OceanGate offered seats aboard its submersible for $250,000 each,
05:50only about 200 people in the world have ever been there. On June 18, 2023, the Titan submersible
05:56descended with five people aboard, including the company's founder, Stockton Rush, and a 19-year-old
06:00Pakistani passenger. The sub lost contact during the dive. Days later, debris was found near the Titanic,
06:07all five drowned, the hull had imploded. The US Coast Guard's investigation report ran 327 pages.
06:13The conclusion, preventable. Rush had used carbon fiber instead of titanium to save money,
06:18and repeated safety warnings inside the company have been suppressed. If Rush had survived,
06:23he would have faced charges of manslaughter. This ship has been sinking for 111 years,
06:27and it is still pulling people down with it. Man's prediction is 2030, maybe sooner. Each year,
06:33the bacteria eat another layer of iron. The currents weaken another beam. The salt water dissolves
06:38another rivet. We cannot lift it, we cannot stop the bacteria, we can barely even look at it safely.
06:44The Titanic is disappearing, and the Atlantic does not care. We are not ready to let go.
06:49But there is one thing worth considering, this bacterium has lived by feeding on this ship for
06:53over a hundred years. If the ship disappears, will this unique microorganism, found nowhere else on earth,
06:58disappear with it. Are we losing one ship, or two species?
07:04The港os of Scanию was switcheon,Sad都 baited its coming in into the empty sea.
07:17In the back of the boat, the ship ran through the ship to the sea.
07:23It is across the ship's ws26ns. The orbit of edit the ship itself...
07:25On the speed of this ship had changed its 600Never bitcoin as well.
