aAt 3:24 a.m. in the Atlantic Ocean, a catastrophe unfolds across the moonlit waters. MS Seascape – a six-deck, 200-meter freighter carrying 4,000 new electric vehicles – has been pushed by a swell in the reef. Annoyingly stopping, the ship began to roll violently alongside and capsize on a reef a few kilometers from port.
The Coast Guard receives the distress call. Helicopters ferry the estranged crew to safety, while support boats offload any cargo that hasn’t already fallen overboard. It’s urgent – the lithium-ion batteries in electric cars are prone to exploding and most vehicles are stored in a hold. In the event of a fire, the pot will become a giant pressure cooker.
Although our MS Seascape is a virtual ship, its situation is far from uncommon. in 2021, 54 large ships It either sank, ran aground, or caught fire and this behemoth more likely to cause Disaster when things go wrong.
But they are also ocean actors in their own right, home to huge colonies of marine life. They are victims, too, of the same threats faced by the ocean: invasive species eating away at their hulls, acidification slowly causing them to disintegrate. Shipwrecks are mirrors showing us not just who we’ve been, but what our future holds on a fast-heating globe.
The pull of these wrecks has been a boon for science, shedding light on a part of the planet that has been shrouded in mystery. “If shipwrecks are the sirens that lure us into the depths, they encourage exploration into what truly is the last frontier of the planet,” says James Delgado of shipwreck company Search Inc. “A frontier that we don’t really know much about.”
Chris Michael and Laura Paddison, Seascape editors
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Question and Answer
What is Shipwrecked Series?
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There are 3 million lost ships beneath the waves, and with new technology finally enabling us to explore them, Guardian Seascape dedicates the series to what is found: secret histories, hidden treasures, and the lessons they teach. Peeps to floors wreck Like the Titanic and Ernest Shackleton’s doomed endurance, To slave ships Like the Clotilda or the Spanish liner galleons South American gold looting Facing us with our turbulent histories, the wrecks are time capsules, holding clues to our identity.
But they are also represented in the ocean itself, home to huge colonies of marine life. They, too, are victims of the same threats the oceans face: invasive species devour their bodies and slowly acidify them, causing them to disintegrate. Wrecks are mirrors that not only show us who we were, but what our future holds in an accelerated world.
The haul of this debris has been a boon for science, shedding light on a part of the planet shrouded in mystery. “If shipwrecks are the sirens that draw us to the depths, they encourage exploration to what is truly the planet’s last frontier,” says James Delgado of Shipwrecks Search Inc.. “A boundary we don’t really know much about.”
Chris Michael and Laura Padison, Seascape Editors
Abandoning ships is rarely an option. The dangers of oil and fuel spills mean that it is now standard practice to try to salvage them and repair any environmental damage. But the costs are astronomical: The Costa Concordia, which ran aground off Genoa, Italy, in 2012, became the most expensive wreck removal operation in history, costing More than a billion dollarsand it took 350 rescue workers nearly three years.
No cookie-cutter approach to rescue: Each operation will vary depending on the location, water depth, weather, equipment, and sensitivity of the surrounding environment.
So what do you do with our default MS Seascape? Let’s get started.
Step 1: Contain spills and remove fuel
The danger posed by MS Seascape, loaded with explosive car batteries, is no different than that of 200 metres. Felicity Ace, who caught fire in the mid-Atlantic before sinking to an irreparable depth of 10,000 feet: it is suspected that 281 EVs on board He might have set the flames on, or at least accelerated in it.
To avoid this fate, a local salvage company is involved, one of a few dozen operators around the world about to rush to the scene of a marine disaster. Its first objective is to save the ship and return it to service.
The location of the vessel has a significant impact on the speed of development of the process. The Rena, a container ship docked off the coast of New Zealand, had to do just that Wait several weeks Equipment arrives from Singapore – during which time the structure is broken.
At this point, it’s too early to tell how much of an impact MS Seascape’s structure has had. In the morning, in calmer conditions, the salvage crew tracks a boom that loops around the ship to catch any fuel and hazardous waste.
Meanwhile, a dedicated team begins to bleed more than 20 tanks holding more than 300,000 gallons of fuel, as well as potential contaminants such as lubricants, gases, and Oily water and sludge.
They drill through the ship’s exposed double-walled steel exterior into fuel bunkers below, inserting pipes to pump waste to a waiting ship. Divers are sent to get inside the ships to drain the remaining submerged tanks. This is a delicate task: removing fuel could destabilize an already unstable ship, so this process could take days, possibly weeks.
Suddenly, crunch: After days of stressing against the reef by the current, stress fractures appear along the structure. They can wreck the ship. This dashes hopes of returning MS Seascape to service – the cost of recovery would now be more than the value of the ship itself.
The job goes from salvage to wreck removal and the real work begins.
Step 2: Cut the coaster into strips
After 10 days, vessel fractures threaten to split the wreck. The team of hundreds of engineers, crane operators, firefighters, laborers, divers and architects must move quickly.
They cut down the residence building to break up the roof and simplify the process. One option to break the ship is to use explosives, such as those applied to the MSC Napoli, a giant container ship on the earth South coast of England in 2007 and It exploded in two Sections. But this would be disastrous for the fragile coral reef ecosystem beneath the wreckage.
Instead, the removal team chooses a thicker cable of diamond-encrusted wire that can cut through inch-thick steel. The saw was mounted in a custom frame which was raised by jacks and transported to the wreck site. Over a period of two days, her feet were embedded in the sea floor on either side of the wreck. Inside the frame, the wire is rotated at high speed through a system of pulleys and lowered, like a guillotine, into the chassis, cut by an ear-piercing roar.
Cutting a single cross-section can take up to 12 hours, but the saw’s surgical precision means it only grazes the corals below. It can also cut between cars parked on the lower decks so there are fewer falls into the sea and around the fuel tank.
Fuel isn’t the only environmental threat: ships contain an extraordinary payload of hazardous materials, such as antifouling chemicals and lead embedded in paint, asbestos in walls, and mercury wound and polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) in electrical in old ships. These pollutants will gradually leach out of structures that are left to rot in the ocean. A sunken German warship is Still filtering chemicals In the North Sea after more than 80 years.
Step 3: Remove the sections and take it to the beach
MS Seascape is now surrounded by ships and equipment ready to engage as parts of the wreck are being cut away. With the ship’s bow resting on a reef, but its stern threatening to sink to the ocean floor when it breaks loose, the team has a two-pronged plan.
First, the massive floating: a gigantic crane on a floating platform capable of lifting 7,000 tons. It is a mechanical island with a housing complex for dozens of workers who will be at sea for weeks dismantling the wreckage.
The crew will split the ship into eight pieces. Starting at the arch, each bracket is drilled with holes through which cables are threaded, then lifted by crane. Piece by piece, the ship is carefully loaded onto waiting barges and hauled away.
The butt requires a different approach. Before the rear is cut free, the support vessels weld massive air-filled metal boxes called caissons to their exposed starboard side. These are partially filled with water, adding weight which rotates the stern vertically when cut free. When the stern is corrected, the port side caissons are also attached. On both sides they are filled in and deflated, achieving the perfect level of buoyancy to keep the stern afloat. Once released and launched into the water, the stern is towed to port.
Not all wrecks will need the same approach. some with relatively little damage, Like Costa ConcordiaShe can be patched, fully refloated with caissons, and then towed away. Others have to be dredged from the sea floor, such as Xpress Pearlwhose cargo of nitric acid caught off the coast of Sri Lanka in 2019 and caused the ship to sink 68 feet — along with its cargo of 50 billion plastic “little things”.flooded the Sri Lankan shores.
The X-Press Pearl needed dozens of cables to lift it from the sea floor, but the monsoon season halted the mission, bringing an operation that is already costing shipowners to a halt. $40 million in environmental compensation claims from the Sri Lankan government.
Even with a well managed wreck like MS Seascape, some spillage is inevitable. Divers, with the help of remotely operated underwater vehicles, locate lost cars and other metal debris, and feed that information to a barge equipped with underwater magnets and mechanical handles.
Two months after the ship ran aground, there is no trace of the MS Navy ship left in the ocean – but the work continues.
Step 4: Dressing the bottom of the vessel
Back on Earth, MS Seascape’s pieces are waiting to be taken apart. The ship was raised the flag of the European Union, which meant that it had to be broken up in one of the 46 yards regulation Scattered throughout Europe, Turkey and the United States.
This means that they will be handled under more stringent requirements than ships on the shipbreaking shores of South Asia, where they are 70% Of the world’s ships end their marine life. Relaxed regulations in these locations lead to dozens worker deaths annually, and the environmental impacts are untold as pollutants wash onto beaches and in the sea.
However, in the dry dock in Italy where most of MS Seascape ends up, the waste is meant to be contained. Over a period of several months, the ship is stripped back to the essentials: asbestos sheets, wiring, equipment, and furniture are removed until only the steel shell is left.
This is where most of the ship’s value now lies. Efficient smelting processes can recycle nearly all of a ship’s steel: approx 90% Most of the materials at Costa Concordia are recycled.
Back at the reef, I started rehab. The water is monitored for residual contaminants, and teams begin transplanting nursery-grown corals into the shattered corals. This will take years: a decade after the Costa Concordia coup, damaged seagrass meadows are still being restored.
Now, reduced to molten steel, some of MS Seascape may be shaped into another gigantic ocean-going statue. As the ingenuity of shipbuilding grows, so will the efforts and costs – and the innovation – required to salvage these sailing ships at sea.