19

A Crevice in Time

SEPTEMBER 13, 2001
RUSSIAN RESEARCH VESSEL KELDYSH
EXPEDITION TITANIC XIII

As soon as the Mir-1 and the Mir-2 surfaced with the rescued bot, Elwood, we “pulled anchor” and began steaming directly toward St. Johns, Newfoundland. One of the sponsors of the expedition had declared that we must cease and desist from all further work, based on the premise that no one would be interested in the Titanic anymore.

Other matters quickly intervened to reverse that order, however. The first cause for change arose from the revelation that several key robotics people had been killed in the Pentagon on September 11, including members of Tom Dettweiler's team. In certain areas of science and engineering, the survivors were at the Titanic. The word came down to Mission Control from John-David Cameron: a plane would be approved for flight to St. Johns, to resupply us from California with any equipment we needed or desired, after which the standing order was simply, “Find something to keep yourselves busy at the Titanic. Go back to the Titanic, where it's safe.”

The “pulling of anchor” had already canceled what was to have been the last dive of the Titanic XIII series, dedicated primarily to biology. A new organism, thriving on the prairies near the Titanic, had displayed for us a sophisticated immune system based on chemical defenses—with multiple disease-fighting potentials. If we could go back and complete the dive series—well, what choice was there? Because the Titanic had sunk where it did, there was a chance to turn something horrible toward the saving of more lives than were lost all those years ago.

In an e-mail to Arthur C. Clarke, I mentioned how, at first, when the Russians took our coms, I was reminded of a scene from his 2010: Odyssey II, in which a developing international crisis on Earth caused the Russian-American crew of a space station to isolate themselves on opposite sides of the ship. I thought the same thing was about to happen to us.

Big Lew Abernathy told me right away that in recalling 2010, I had underestimated the Russians. “There are no words in English to describe the pain that we Russians feel for you,” said Sergey Kudriashov, the expedition's cameraman for Russian television.

When Anatoly Sagalevich finally came down from the bridge on September 12, bearing the fax from Mary, he produced the piece of paper only after he had learned from me that her mother was safe. He suddenly had tears running down to his chin. Throwing his arms around me, Sagalevich said something that fifteen years earlier I could never have imagined hearing from a former Cold Warrior: “We are all Americans now.”

All of us agreed that no matter what acts of stupidity our two governments might commit in the future, on this little piece of planet Earth called the Keldysh, we were now and always would be family.

• • •

By the time we reached St. Johns, Newfoundland, we were receiving the first clear feeds of still photographs, revealing the stages of the Twin Towers collapsing. Photos from police helicopters showed the South Tower surge cloud moving westward over the water at substantial speed and still with substantial mass. The photos illustrated for us what had previously seemed inexplicable and perhaps even impossible: Pliny the Younger had described a pyroclastic surge cloud moving effortlessly over the face of the water during the AD 79 burial of Pompeii by Vesuvius, but for most of two thousand years, no one believed him.

I contacted Haraldur Sigurddson, a volcanologist who had sailed with me and Dettweiler during Robert Ballard's Argo-RISE expedition, in the fall and winter of 1985. While robotically mapping and filming the hydrothermal vent zones of the East Pacific Rise, we were able, in our spare time, to examine the first robotic reconnaissance photos and video of the Titanic, dating back to only a few weeks before. From the very start, it appeared that something had exploded over the very center of the Titanic, in the manner of a fluidlike, volcanic column of ash suddenly collapsing downward, under its own weight, upon a city.

In this case, the collapsing column was the slipstream of water trailing behind the Titanic. Inertia then kept the column punching down into the earth from the moment the Titanic stopped descending. “Down-blast,” I had called it. The column collapse and down-blast effect bulldozed vertical bulkheads outward from the center of the ship and also hurled outward, in a spreading surge cloud of deep-ocean sediment, broken railings, floor tiles, forks, and glass.

The concept of column collapse applied as much to Sigurddson's studies of the Mount Vesuvius surge clouds as it did to the Titanic—and vice versa. Each area of study fed back to the other (except that at the Titanic, one did not have to excavate a buried city over the course of decades to reconstruct what had happened; it was all laid out in pictures). Likewise, the first pictures from New York were showing us that volcano physics applied with spine-chilling fidelity to the collapse of the Twin Towers. This observation quickly began to redirect the focus of research as I prepared for our return to the Titanic.

Two millennia after the eruption of Vesuvius and the surge clouds in Pompeii, nearly a century after the Titanic and in a way no archaeologist could ever have anticipated, the fall of the Twin Towers pointed the way toward a new understanding—which might ultimately save lives in volcanic hot zones. If anything could drive home the message that the only way to survive a volcanic surge cloud was to obey the predictions of people like Sigurddson and not be anywhere near one when it formed, the physics of 9/11 pointed the way. The eruption that surged through Pompeii in AD 79 was a thousand times more powerful than a Hiroshima-level atomic bomb (roughly 10 percent the force of the Hiroshima bomb). The combined collapse force of the Twin Towers was 1.6 kilotons. The approximately 40-mile-per-hour column-collapse that impacted the Titanic bow section was minuscule compared to the towers, just as the 120-mile-per-hour World Trade Center column collapses were minuscule compared to Vesuvius, but each of them was full of new insights.

“When Charlie and I started to discuss the eruption of Vesuvius and the events of 9/11,” Sigurddson told a friend, “both of us realized the very interesting features of this parallel: when the Towers came down, they looked just like a column-collapse, when an entire eruption column cascades down, just like [a column, from a fountain of] water—and it cascades down, then it spreads over the ground.”

At the place in New York that was being called ground zero, the physics were nearly identical, but with two critical differences: witnesses and temperature. Because the Titanic was two and a half miles underwater, no one ever saw the ship's column collapse and down-blast effect in action. The evidence was etched in bent steel and across a blanket of ejected artifacts. Volcanic column collapses and pyroclastic flows (of air and hot dust) typically surged at more than four times the boiling point of water and killed every potential witness they touched. The collapse of the Twin Towers created crushing forces—up to six tons per square inch—but this falling debris cloud was not (in most places) nearly as hot as a volcanic column collapse. This allowed firsthand eyewitnesses to survive it, at close range (at least, until the Zadroga effect, also called Ground Zero lung disease, reached into their bodies and began to kill).

Sigurddson and I realized that there was an important study to be carried out in New York. A return to the Titanic would provide additional baseline information for that study. Conversely, the World Trade Center investigation would enhance our understanding of the Titanic and of Vesuvius, as well as giving us clues about what to expect from other volcanic hot spots. In New York, for the first time and from virtually every angle, every stage of the column-collapse, down-blast, and surge-cloud events had been recorded on film.

Even more important, there were surge-cloud survivors—and not just from outside the column-collapse event, but inside. One of FDNY captain Paul Mallery's men from Ladder 10, Engine 10, had actually been a shock-cocoon survivor. As we approached St. Johns, Newfoundland, I received word of fourteen people safely cocooned inside a six-story, twelve-foot-wide stairwell in the core of the North Tower. In addition to what forensic archaeology could teach, their stories would provide unprecedented data about the physics that pounded portions of the Titanic flat and guided pyroclastic density currents through Pompeii. With this information, we could begin to explain how a table remained set for lunch in the nearby ancient Roman town of Herculaneum while half of the mansion was carried away, how Edith Russell's cup remained in its fragile holder while so much else nearby was destroyed, and how a small number of people inside a vertical tsunami of debris and down-blasting air were shock-cocooned on 9/11 while so many others were killed.

Aboard the Keldysh, I told John-David Cameron of my plan. I had already completed my one scheduled dive for the expedition, and I was quite satisfied with my “day of magic in the ever-black.” All I needed now was for someone to gather new information from a handful of key targets. In the debris field, chunks of steel ranging from toaster-size to table-size had rained down from what I called the liquefaction zone, located between the bow and the stern, and concentrated mostly below the boat deck, just ahead of the fourth funnel. There were areas I wanted the observers to film in more detail, to perhaps illuminate what happened in a similar liquefaction zone that appeared to have developed (first along the east side) as the South Tower sagged and then snapped suddenly eastward, before accelerating toward terminal velocity.

Up to this point, Big Lew Abernathy and the Russians had been helping to keep me enough at peace to at least try and get some sleep. Abernathy kept reminding me of United Airlines Flight 93 whenever I seemed to be getting too worried about the future.

“Remember Shanksville,” he told me—repeatedly. “We'll all get through this. United 93. That's what we're made of.” Not just Americans are made of this stuff, he emphasized. All humans were born with the capacity to put the other person first. “Remember Dr. O'Loughlin,” the Keldysh's surgeon said, offering me a Russian alcoholic concoction called a Sheila. “Drink heavily.” I wasn't about to obey that order too often. After only two glasses of the Russian doctor's “medicine,” I sent a very mushy letter to Mary—but I had mistakenly e-mailed it to Arthur C. Clarke instead, who wrote back, “Charlie, I love you too, but not in the same way.”

John-David Cameron was more serious. He began giving me strange, clearly uneasy looks as I described for him the intended study of the WTC crater. He could easily see that my way of coping with the unthinkable was to bury myself in the science of it. He seemed concerned about my health. Initially, I thought his concern was for my emotional health.

“Look,” I said, “there are maybe six other people in the world who really understand down-blast, and I'm the one in New York. Now, I'm told we've got Port Authority police officers, NYPD, and FDNY—all of whom were trained in telling you, ‘At this minute, I was standing here, within two feet of this spot on the map; and this is where I ended up; and this is what I observed; and this is what I felt.' From what I'm hearing, we have more than two hundred such eyewitnesses—many of whom are willing to talk—and each of these is like having a ‘black box' flight recorder.”

“Don't go in there,” John-David said. “In fact, I'd stay away from New York altogether, if I were you.”

It was my physical health that worried him. According to a report he had received from the Centers for Disease Control, there would be additional casualties, in years to come, just from what was in the air. No one had ever before burned large quantities of aluminum and Teflon mixed with gasifying plastics, cartridge ink, liquid crystal sheets, and other random, flame-toxified substances—all of this in a “background radiation” of gypsum, alkaline dust, and enough asbestos to get half of Manhattan Island condemned if it were a building.

I only saw, in the study, a chance to save lives in volcanic hot zones, using what we could learn at the Titanic and at the crater.

I reminded John-David of Paddy Brown. He and Bill Paxton knew about Paddy being recategorized from “missing” to “lost” before I did. Somehow, about a quarter of the people in Hollywood seemed either to have known him or known of him, long before the 9/11 attacks. He sure did have a way of getting around.

“You know what they told me happened with Pat Brown when he entered the North Tower?” I said. “Another firefighter—a guy who seemed to have a very clear picture in his mind of what was really happening overhead—called out, ‘Pat! Don't go up there!'

“And Paddy's reply was, ‘Are you nuts? We've got a job to do!'”

Those were the words I would live by.

SEPTEMBER 19, 2001
RUSSIAN RESEARCH VESSEL KELDYSH
120 MILES FROM THE TITANIC

We received a drawing by fax from my daughter Amber's second-grade class at P.S. 26 in Queens. At a memorial service in the school auditorium, the children's chorus had chosen the song “My Heart Will Go On” from the film Titanic. How does one get the thought out of one's head of children singing that theme, for parents lost?

SEPTEMBER 21, 2001
RUSSIAN RESEARCH VESSEL KELDYSH

Jim Cameron discovered what is presently the only large piece of debris found forward of the bow section: the steel hatch cover that once stood on the forecastle, capping the number 1 cargo hold. He found it lying upside down, about seventy meters directly in front of the Titanic's prow, with a V-shaped whack, or pucker, on one side.

The well-deck cranes and the pressed-back foremast were completely undamaged by blunt-force impacts, which meant that the steel lid had not lifted off near the surface and banged around the well deck during descent—which in turn meant that the same bending and compression of the bow section that blew down all of the steel-bolted tables in the firemen's mess and recreation room, all in the same direction, had popped the hatch like a cork during that same small fraction of a second. Flying straight up, the hatch cover could not have traveled very far, not much more than about ten feet before, almost instantly, the column collapse and the down-blast impacted the center of the bow and struck out laterally.

What began, ever so briefly, as a vertical ascent of the hatch cover would have been converted immediately into lateral motion as the cargo hatch, along with hundreds of floor tiles and personal items jetting out of the upper deck windows and trailing down in the slipstream, became part of a radial surge cloud. The single, V-shaped dent in the hatch cover was consistent with the diameter of the vertical steel post that supported the anchor crane on the tip of the bow, suggesting that the hatch collided with the post on the ship's prow, then continued straight ahead for nearly three hundred feet.

The strange journey of the number 1 cargo hatch cover conveyed some sense of the volcano physics we were beginning to explore. Yet the crash of the Titanic's bow on the bed of the Atlantic, I reminded myself, involved only a fraction of the forces waiting to be studied in New York.

Ken Marschall's mapping of the buckling points near and around the bend of the well deck revealed that the rows of steel plates tended to ripple and warp, shattering only at the points where the aftermost part of the bow section tried to telescope forward under the well deck. At the very end of the bow section, where the decks had been stacked on one another by the down-blast, the starboard and port sides rippled outward more like thick slabs of rubber than like steel.

The stern deep-hammered itself into the earth at even greater velocity; there, just one cubic yard of water impacting an inch-thick sheet of steel was equivalent to a ton of water trying to burst through at more than fifty miles per hour. This happened to every square meter and yard of the stern section, and it was inflicted by an entire column of water thirty yards wide, more than sixty-five yards long, and at least a hundred yards tall. For at least one small part of a second, the action of steel sheeting and the slipstream of water that surrounded it and shot down upon it must have been indistinguishable.

Slabs of inch-thick steel were blasted off the stern and strewn up to seventy yards away by the surge clouds. They often resembled curled leaves, bent as much as ninety degrees back on themselves without breaking. When surrounded by and ejected by a sufficiently powerful column of down-blasting water, steel could act astonishingly like the water blast in which it was enveloped.

Although initial examination of the curled-leaf steel-plate fragments gave the appearance of having been warmed and then bent, the crystal structure, when viewed under a microscope, revealed that the curled pieces had undergone microcracking throughout, providing enormous surface areas for rusticles to take root. This explained why bent, highly stressed steel tended to sprout the most luxuriant rusticle formations.

Over a much wider area around the stern, scattered more than five hundred feet in every direction, were pieces of steel that broke away near the surface—many minutes before the surge clouds were formed—and which fluttered down like snowflakes and leaves, ranging in size from a few inches across to huge sections of the double-hulled bottom. Collectively, they told the story of utter disintegration as the lower half of the stern section, trying to fall level with the sea surface, crashed forward into the bow section and, for a second or two, sent the reciprocating engine room telescoping into the rear boiler room.

Above the steam engines, the entire deck of the galley and pantry broke free, joining a shower of bending and cracking parts—tens of thousands of parts—caught between two great forces that made everything in and around the junction of the break behave as if they were individual sand grains and pieces of seashell in a sand castle, brought down by a wave. Normally rigid structures rippled and shattered like walls of cinderblock and steel-reinforced concrete that, built upon seemingly solid sandy earth, resonated with the ground itself when a quake-generated process called liquefaction turned solid ground into a stormy sea.

During the breakaway of the Titanic's stern, the area between the third and fourth smokestacks—and especially along the lower decks, within the junction of the break—was dominated by a process very similar to liquefaction. In that region, no individual piece of the Titanic, large or small, behaved any longer as though it had ever been part of anything else. Collectively, all of the pieces became separate elements in a fountain of debris. They afterward fell to the bottom in a spreading shower effect. Yet even within this shower, objects of the same density and grain size—the boilers were an example of this—sometimes tended to fall together and at the same speed.

SEPTEMBER 21, 2001

We had, from the navy, fresh comparative material from the wreck of the Ehime Maru, a steel-hulled Japanese fishing boat sunk in a collision with an American submarine on February 9, 2001. It fell to a depth of six hundred meters (just over a third of a mile), achieving a terminal velocity equivalent, at least, to the Titanic's bow section.

Nine people, including four high school students, were trapped inside the Ehime Maru when it sank. As we set out for the Titanic again, a naval operation was placing straps under the 191-foot-long vessel, so it could be raised into shallower water.

Here is what has happened: Deck railings and vertical bulkheads that were not damaged during the collision with the surfacing submarine were bulldozed outward from the center of the ship—just as we had seen in the case of the Titanic's bow and stern sections. The Ehime Maru impacted at an angle of at least ten degrees down-bubble, partly burying itself in deep-ocean sediment, almost exactly as the Titanic did. The rear portions of the hull (much in the manner of the Titanic's bow section), buckled behind the point of sediment burial, with the sea floor acting like a knee, or a fulcrum, against which the keel was broken like a stick.

Water trapped between the sea floor and the Ehime Maru's keel at the moment of impact ended up being jetted out through an impact crater, carving out a narrow canyon in the ocean sediment very reminiscent of the prominent canyon along the starboard side of the Titanic's bow. The down-blast and surge-cloud effects that immediately followed the impact of the Ehime Maru's column collapse uprooted railings and other deck structures and carried them out to a radius approximately equal to the ship's length—again, just as the Titanic's surge clouds did.

SEPTEMBER 22, 2001
8 A.M.

Jim Cameron opened the production meeting by noting that not everyone in the room had arrived, in accordance with regulations, properly dressed.

“As I have said from day one,” he announced, “everyone at these meetings who is scheduled for a dive is to arrive already in their Mir suits.” A camera turned toward me, and Cameron asked, “Charlie! Where's your Mir suit?”

He got me—totally by surprise.

And for a reason I did not yet comprehend (and never would), it was about to turn out that I needed this dive. The last time, I surfaced into a world of horror. Now, although I missed my family more than words could describe, a part of me did not want to face the job that awaited me in New York. I did not want to see the World Trade Center crater, but I took comfort in the knowledge that Paddy Brown's words—“We've got a job to do”—would gird my spine.

Somehow, two and a half miles down in the everblack, I was about to come to peace with something, in preparation for the road ahead.

Big Lew Abernathy was making the dive with me. He put a hand on my shoulder and said, “Earth to Charlie: You have five minutes to pack your gack.”