Reading through this thread on miltary miscellany I dimly recalled a fact someone told me regarding the steel from the Titanic.
It was something to do with the fact that since 1945 and the detonation of the nuclear bombs at Hiroshima and Nagasaki (plus the many nuclear blasts since), all steel on earth is contaminated with radioactive fallout. Literally all steel, with the exception of the Titanic.
Because the Titanic is buried so deep in the ocean it was unaffected by the blasts.
From what I recall this is particularly important in certain areas - radiocarbon dating etc - as the radioactive isotopes released by atom bombs impact the results used to measure aging. Steel from the Titanic was used as a “reference sample” to allow scientists to recalibrate.
Does anyone else have any details on this? Or am I misremembering? I have a horrible feeling I might have read it in a Clive Cussler novel. :o
Why only the Titanic?
There are lots of steel ships at the bottom of oceans.
Like the Bismark, which is deeper than the Titanic (and still in one piece, too). Or the Yorktown in the Pacific. Or even the Edmund Fitzgerald, sunk in Lake Superior – not nearly as deep but much farther away from Hiroshima & Nagasaki.
It’s the steel smelted before above ground nuclear testing. It’s useful for radiation detectors.
The thing is, there’s no reason to fool with the Titanic- there are dozens, if not hundreds of old German submarines and other vessels that the Allies sunk after WWII, with no war grave or other grave issues, and we also know exactly where they are. There are also six or so German WWI ships still sunk at or near Scapa Flow that were never salvaged.
Interestingly, this pre-nuclear steel is used as shielding containers for various low-level radiation detectors.
But now, the most sensitive detectors are being placed deep underground. One of the major ones is in the Soudan Mine Lab in northern Minnesota – a mine that for many years produced the taconite that the Edmund Fitzgerald spent years hauling across the Great Lakes.
Well, that’s a bit of an exaggeration.
The US only did about 175 in Nevada and 1 in Alaska up until the 1963 treaty banned aboveground tests. (Most tests were done in the Pacific during that time.) And I don’t think the USSR or anybody else did any tests in Nevada.
As for radiation shielding, neutrino detectors also use lead ballast from ships sunken in the age of sail. Not only does such lead predate the atomic age, it’s also been shielded from most cosmic rays for a very long time.
As noted this was something I only dimly recalled - I knew the Titanic was mentioned (as it falls into the class “ships that sank before 1945”), but wasn’t sure whether other pre-1945 wrecks were included or whether the exceptional depth of the Titanic made a difference.
I see reading around that there are much deeper shipwrecks - notably the USS Hoel which is 24,000ft down (compared with 12,500ft for the Titanic).
Why would the steel have to be from a shipwreck? Wouldn’t any steel smelted before 1945 be just as good, regardless of source? You can pull the girders from a building built in 1940 and demolished recently much more easily than trying to recover steel from deep water shipwrecks. I don’t see how radioactive isotopes from the atmosphere can become part of a solid steel structure…
I had some whole body counting done at Sieversdorf, Austria. It was in a chamber made from salvaged steel plates…extra holes in odd places. Quite at odds with the high tech equipment inside.
I’ve read that a big source for pre-1945 high-grade steel is the German High Seas Fleet that was scuttled at Scapa Flow in 1919. There are a large number of ships there at a known location just off the coast of Scotland. A lot more convenient than the middle of the North Atlantic.
My understanding is that it’s not a proximity issue. Any nuclear explosion will put detectible amounts of radioactive material into the atmosphere and it will circulate around the entire world in a matter of days.
You know, we gotta sink the Bismarck to the bottom of the sea. We’ll find that German battleship, That’s makin’ such a fuss. We gotta sink the Bismarck, …
When I worked for a Navy contractor, if “clean” steel was needed for a device, such as a Geiger counter, that material was referenced as “BSS” - battleship steep - since all the battleships in the US Navy (active or retired) had had their hulls layed down before WWII.
