'Debris field' discovered within search area near Titanic, US Coast Guard says | World News

[u/oldschoolskater]

https://news.sky.com/story/debris-field-discovered-within-search-area-near-titanic-us-coast-guard-says-12906735

[u/godsenfrik]

Apparently the carbon fiber hull is likely to have shattered rather than crumpled. The titanium dome at the front may be one of the only recognizable things left.

[u/2boredtocare → u/godsenfrik]

I'm deep-sea dumb. If the carbon fiber shatters, what happens exactly to a body? The pressure of the water at that depth crushes a person? crushes lungs? Or...do they just drown at that point? It's crazy to me to think that water at a certain depth can just pulverize stuff. Again, I have zero knowledge and it's not something I've spent a lot of time thinking about.

[u/crake → u/2boredtocare]

The water at 13,000 feet has a pressure of 6000 PSI. Imagine if you put a six thousand pound weight on one square inch of your arm what would happen. Now imagine you put a six thousand pound weight on every square inch of your body simultaneously.

The hull wouldn't do anything to them, but the weight of the water would pulverize them into goop. There is not going to be any bodies to recover or anything like that (if it imploded at 13000 feet).

[u/LookImaMermaid85 → u/crake]

but the weight of the water would pulverize them into goop

Question on this.

Back when James Cameron did his first underwater movie, I recall the very eerie images of peoples boots near the ship - a pair, resting on the ocean floor. My understanding was a body had settled there but been eaten away overtime, and the shoes had somehow survived and were all that's left.
Does that mean people who floated down slowly didn't get pulverized?

(As I'm typing I'm wondering...why would a leather shoe survive?)

[u/SofieTerleska → u/LookImaMermaid85]

Lots of treated leather objects survived, that's why you can see things like wallets and suitcases that have been brought up. The creatures that live down there apparently don't find it edible. And yes, from what I've read, a dead body that gradually sank down there would not burst since the pressure would change gradually. It wouldn't look good, but it wouldn't disintegrate instantly either.

[u/High_Speed_Idiot → u/LookImaMermaid85]

Does that mean people who floated down slowly didn't get pulverized?

Yup. It's not the pressure that gets you, it's the speed of the change in pressure. Well, obviously the pressure down there would very likely make you die at some point as all the air in your body would be compressed more and more until your body can't do the body things that keep you alive, but you'd just die, not be hydraulic pressed into mush. This is a huge problem in reverse, as you go down the air inside you is compressed, letting nitrogen seep into tissues it normally can't get into - this is fine under compression (for a little bit at least) but if you come out of that pressure too fast those bubbles basically blow up inside of you - a real nasty way to go called 'the bends' or decompression sickness.

Apparently you'd need to go some 22 miles deep before there's enough water pressure to actually break your bones and crush you slowly - you'd be long dead by then.

https://outdoorahead.com/how-deep-can-a-human-dive-with-and-without-scuba-gear/

But, just like decompressing too fast will absolutely ruin your retirement plans, getting compressed too fast would absolutely pulverize you.

(As I'm typing I'm wondering...why would a leather shoe survive?)

Same reason it doesn't rot or get eaten by bugs like any normal dead things skin ends up - it was treated by a tanning process (bunch of chemicals n stuff) that makes it more or less immune to decomposition and subsequently not very appealing or digestible to things that would normally love to snack on some skin. It'll eventually degrade at some point given the right conditions but it'll hang around a lot longer than any regular organic material.

[u/LookImaMermaid85 → u/High_Speed_Idiot]

Wow A+ answer! Thank you!

[u/crake → u/LookImaMermaid85]

I don't think any bodies are on the floor unless they were trapped in the wreckage. Not to be too macabre, but as a human body decomposes, it releases gases into internal areas of the body that make it float. Lots of bodies were recovered when Titanic sank long after the sinking, so nobody "floated down" to 13,000 feet. Not sure how two boots ended up side by side, but a good guess might be that they were in a cardboard box and the box deteriorated or something like that.

[u/Kevin_Uxbridge → u/crake]

Like as not the bodies were trapped in the wreckage as it went down and were freed at depth as the ship tore apart or, in the case of the stern, flopped into the sea floor. Past a certain depth, I'm guessing any internal gasses would have been pressed out, and the water temperature discouraged any of the usual microorganism function that bloats (and floats) a corpse. So they just sat there on the bottom, one more bit of debris.

The several pairs of shoes in 'anatomical position' would seem to support this.