M/S Explorer

[Werner]

Getting a little late for salvage....

[Timmy C]

Ice came pretty quickly...or the currents moved the ship to the ice pretty quickly.

[Werner]

You know, if you believe in human influenced climate change, transporting yourself half-way around the world to see the Antarctic is the height of hypocrisy. Even if you don't support the "conventional wisdom" on this, it is still an immense waste of resources. Get a subscription to National Geographic instead.

The view from the weather deck is indistinguishable from a similar view off Greenland or Svalbard.

Sinking a ship is an immense impact on the fauna of the deep oceans. They transport more aggressive surface bacteria and fungi to the deep oceans. In the Antarctic, a sinking like this must have an impact similar to a nuclear detonation on the future course of life there.

[HMAS]

You know, if you believe in human influenced climate change, transporting yourself half-way around the world to see the Antarctic is the height of hypocrisy.
snippy snip
Sinking a ship is an immense impact on the fauna of the deep oceans. .

Qantas offers Antarctic flights during summer, just to get money from people who can say they flew over the antarctic. & saw the sights take a sailing ship if you must see it & get exercise at the same time!

Secondly I believe we have to look at any ship that sank after 1940 including WWII ships that are classified as war graves.
Some of these ships need to be "drained" of oil at the least. A German sub off of Norway is being considered for encasing in concrete due to its cargo of mercury & the list continues around the world.
I am not wishing to desecrate a grave, but consider those crew who died, were fighting to " save us" & to now have their vessel cause more problems in the world I think just maybe, would agree with shifting a few bones if any left from the sea life, to save local environmental disasters.
After all an aircraft found in the Jungle or buried in a field in for arguments sake Holland with the crew on board is removed if possible & the bodies reinterred at a war grave site. The same with army personnel.
look at our cemetries we can dig up the plot & contents after 99yrs & resell the plot to someone else to be buried in. (Well we cannot but the cemetry owners can & do!)
This is going to be a touchy subject but something should have been done 30 yrs ago at least.

[Werner]

HMAS, you raise an important point. Unless you wish to preserve the wreck for some reason, it would be far easier to inject them with the appropriate species of Pseudomonas bacteria. These will begin (slowly) the process of decomposition of the oil stores aboard. A few years later, if necessary, another inoculation of bacteria can complete the job.

Remember, oil seeps are natural. Fuel oil and gasoline are natural. Bacteria, water and fuel oil will naturally eliminate the contamination in a few decades and with a tiny investment compared to attempts at recovery.

Indeed, in many wrecks this is happening as we speak.

[HMAS]

Granted Werner
But do we have the time available for bacterial decomposition? Toxic chemicals ? The rust & effects of the ocean are quickly rusting away the shells of the oil tanks, some have been leaking since the 1980's. A drop every week or two at first then... a large leak sooner or later.
Tony
On a happier note, Uncle Chuck released "The Origin of the Species" on this day.

[Werner]

For wrecks below 300 meters, the oil gains the consistency of asphalt, traps the lighter fractions, and is unlikely to be a significant risk. The bacteria also work best at 0-2C. For shallower wrecks, some kind of remediation is necessary depending on circumstances.

Bunker oil has a specific gravity of ~0.9 at 60F. Sea water is 1.0.

[Werner]

Location of the wreck of M/V Explorer: 62 degrees 24 minute South and 57 degrees 16 minutes west. I do not have a time of sinking yet.

I suspect the cruise operators did not take into account the record advance of Antarctic sea ice and icebergs this year. It seems as there is ice loss in the Arctic, there is a gain in the Antarctic; obviously a cyclical process which the press is unwilling to report in flashy articles about "The Northwest Passage".

No doubt since much more Antipodean atmospheric water is trapped in the Antarctic ice cover, this leads to droughts in Australia and similar locales.

Note that 62 degrees N is close to the latitude of Anchorage, the Shetlands, Bergen, Oslo, Helsinki and Petrozavodsk.

[Pieter]

Oil seeps are natural but not on the scale human are doing this, or in the places where humans are doing it. Most large tanker disasters have happened in areas where oil seeps do not occur, and antarctica is also rather devoid of oil seeps.
Oh, and psuedomonas has a serious problems with low temperatures.
But I agree with your remarks about the stupidity of having a whole fleet of crusie ships hanging around antarctica every antarctic summer. This is not the first incident.

Remember, oil seeps are natural. Fuel oil and gasoline are natural. Bacteria, water and fuel oil will naturally eliminate the contamination in a few decades and with a tiny investment compared to attempts at recovery.

Indeed, in many wrecks this is happening as we speak.

[MartinL]

I must be stupid,but why is she going backwards ????

[HMAS]

I must be stupid,but why is she going backwards ????

She's not she is going astern!
1 the crew are trying to mitagate the water entry?
2 at the inquest we will find out hopefully.
3 a huge loss of life would have done more for the global warming cause, as more people would think twice about sailing/playing in the iceburgs.
Tony

[kennylibben]

well the last few pics she doesn't seem to be moving,

but when they hit ice or see ice ahead they put it in reverse to try to avoid hitting it or more of it. So i'm sure they slammed it into reverse as soon as they realized what was going on. Also, i can see someone believing that going backwards with a hole in the bow would help reduce the amount of water going in it, it very slightly holds true.

[Werner]

She ship is NOT underway. You see the slick of water under her lee. She had been evacuated for hours by the time the photos were taken. If she had power, you would see exhaust gases as a disruption from the funnel in these temperatures.

Regarding bacterial intervention, the Pseudomonas could work effectively at temperatures as low as -5C in salt water. One only need to look at Titanic to see the progression of aggressive life in the face of any quantity of food.

[Dustermaker]

the article i read about the sinking said the hole was the size of a fist.........call me silly but dont they have better damage control on a ship than that? I mean they could have closed off some sections once people were evacutated right? At least kept it afloat....

[Lesforan]

A hole the size of a fist should not have caused this much damage. Dustermaker, I too heard this statment and it didn't sound right to me, either.

Even allowing for the poor compartmentalization in comparison to a warship, a hit like this should have to penetrate more than one watertight compartment to endanger the ship's bouyancy. A worst-case scenario:
a penetration directly on the frame separating two compartments, with attendant cracking, causing simultaneous flooding of two adjacent compartments. Longitudinal bulkheads dividing these compartments causing assymetrical flooding, leading to the pronounced list seen in the pictures. Large internal volume of compartments compromised, maximizing weight of water shipped.

As the compartments flood, water level rises to allow more water to enter through openings high on the hull or in the decks. Possibility of water going over the top of flooded compartments, flooding adjacent compartments.

Possible but unlikely that a "fist-sized hole" would do all this. How would anyone really know, short of exploring the wreck? A hole may be observed as "fist-sized", but who is going to remain in a lower, flooding compartment just to see if the hole gets bigger?

This mishap will almost certainly be blamed on failure to avoid an obvious hazard, with severe damage to several careers. Fortunately, it could have been much worse. Rather than obsessing over possible environmental damage, we should be happy that no lives were lost. As long as ships have been going to sea, they have been sinking. There is no practical way to have ocean comerce without losing a few ships. Environmental damage is one of the costs of seafaring.

[Werner]

The survey of the ship done in Scotland a few weeks before she sailed raised the watertight doors as an exception, stating "not as required".

[kennylibben]

the article i read said the crew called it a fist sized hole but the military men that came to the rescue said it was much larger than a fist sized hole.

[Guest]

Maybe someone can rigorous calculate how long it would take to completely flood out that ship from a single "fist sized hole" at a presumed depth if there were no effective internal water tight partitions at all. I seem to recall that 53000 ton (displacement) Titanic suffered a 2 square foot rupture as a result of ice berg collision, and sank in 2 hours. My fist is about 4 inches on the knuckle side and 2 inches deep, give or take. That makes it ~1/30th the size of Titanic's rupture. Let's say this ship is 1/10 the size of the titanic, that suggests that this ship would have taken about 6 hours to go under from flood through a fist sized hole if her internal partition was as porous as those of the Titanic.

This suggests to me there was very little effective containment of flooding aboard this this.

How does that make you feel about the safety of this ship. A few holes each the size of a rivet is all that stands between you and eternity.

[Guest]

You know, if you believe in human influenced climate change, transporting yourself half-way around the world to see the Antarctic is the height of hypocrisy. Even if you don't support the "conventional wisdom" on this, it is still an immense waste of resources. Get a subscription to National Geographic instead..

Yes, but I will still feel my life more fulfilled if I actually set foot where Ernst Shackleton has stood.

[Guest]

A few years ago there was a Russian cruise ship that also struck an iceberg and assumed a precarious list. But I believe she survived and made port.