I seem to remember reading somewhere that some of the skid marks left by the submersibles in the bottom mud had been pretty well obscured between expeditions. That would seem to indicate that there must have been some kind of 'bottom storm'(or at least a major change in the velocity of the ocean currents) during the time between those expeditions.
I can't recall the source of that information, but if I find it, I'll post on where I came across it.
I was curious about the rusting of the shipwreck itself. I thought it was just normal rust, but now I understand that there is very little oxygen in the water and that the rust is produced by bacteriological means and is not the usual rusting that we're all familiar with.
That last part has puzzled me quite a bit. Is it all bacteriological actions that are eating the wreck, or is there also a much slower rusting away also going on through the interaction of oxygen in the seawater?
I'm not a member of the 'leave it alone in the dark' school of thought as regards to what should be done with the shipwreck. If I had my druthers, I'd send spider walker robots in with sonar sensors on their feet and scoop up every single artifact lying hidden on every single deck in the whole ship. The time is fast approaching when the top decks will start tumbling down into the wreck and block off access to whatever is inside of her. Eventually we'll have a steel wall with portholes in it that is the hull plating and a pile of rust laying at the bottom between those walls.
Oxidation can take place quit fast with steel, as anyone who has ever set fire to steel wool in science class will remember. The slow oxidation of rusting in sea water is the same thing, but not as quick. My mental image of the ship was that it was slowly burning up in the sea, and nothing can be done about it, so why not salvage every thing out of her that could be taken? Twenty two hundred people carry a lot of luggage and whatnot with them. As it stands now, we're never going to see any of that stuff again. Yes, in a few centuries, some archeologists might winnow through the rust and suck up all the wedding rings, gold pocket watch casings, ceramic tiles and dishes, but that will be all that is left. Things made of gold, brass and ceramics.
Sorry to have gotten side tracked there, but I do have a question here about the rusticles. I understand that the exterior ones have a tough, leathery surface, and they also have a hollow insides and are made up of several different components. There seems to be some kind of specialization going on in the colony of a rusticle, and there are several separate -what is the word? Molds? Bacterium?- in side of each rust stalactite. However, inside of the ship, it's like a Disney cartoon haunted house, with very delicate and fragile rust that instantly turns into a cloud of rust when you touch it. It seems a bit odd to me that those rust colonies have evolved rudimentary circulation systems on the exterior rusticles and a tough hide to protect them, while the interior rust is super fragile and unprotected from non existent currents. Someone saw a 'plume of smoke' coming out of the wreck on one of the dives when the current conditions were right, so every once in a while, it looks like there are 'cross ventilation' currents that flow through the ship's interior.
Is the bacterium inside the wreck different from the exterior bacterium?
I know that this is a bit of a strange way to look at this, but are we seeing how life evolves here? Until the ship came crashing down from the surface, that was pretty much an empty field of lifeless mud. Then all of a sudden, here is this 'manna from heaven' of organic materials plunked down and this strange bacterium starts finding a place for it's spores to land and sprout and in less than a hundred years, we're seeing specialization functions taking place inside the rusticles. What does this say about how fast life evolved on Earth? Or is this the evolution of life at all that we are looking at? Besides the steel, there were plenty of germs arriving with the demised passengers and crew that were still trapped inside when the ship foundered and who suddenly found their corridors turned into impassible vertical shafts. Might this iron reducing life have arrived in the passengers guts and lungs? Is there any relationship between the bacterium eating the wreck and stuff in side of our own bodies? After all, every time a blood cell circulates through your lungs, it 'rusts' and picks up oxygen, then goes to nourish every other cell in our bodies, so might that ability to pick up oxygen be a more highly specialized version of that bacterium we see eating the ship? I have no idea if this is so or not, but have any scientists located the spores for that bacterium drifting along in the bottom currents all set to sprout when they come in contact with iron? This seems to me that it would be a fairly simple and obvious experiment: Just move a bit upstream of the current flowing past the ship and uncork a bottle and get a sample and culture it. Generating six thousand PSI and 28 F isn't that complicated a task, is it? If that bacterium is floating around in the world's sea water, it should be a fairly simple matter to find. If it is not, then it arrived in the blood streams of the passengers, or the food that was on board, and would need high pressure and a low temperature and some iron to start it growing.
I realize that this is a rather specialized question in advanced biology, but does anyone know if anyone has looked in seawater to find out if those spores are there or not? Forgive me for asking such an off the wall question here, but I can't think of any where else I could find a group that knows so much about the shipwreck and I hope that nobody thinks that I'm out of line by my speculating on this matter of biological science here.
After all, if you look at this from a slightly tilted perspective and my speculations about spores in human blood are correct, you could say that the drowned passengers are responsible for burning the ship up.
It's either that, or life specializing into cooperative colonies in less than a hundred years. That seems awfully fast to me, but that bacterium had to come from somewhere. Human blood isn't usually chilled down to 28F and subjected to six thousand pounds per square inch, and spores have to have the just the right conditions to sprout. I have no idea of what the freezing point of seawater is at six thousand psi, but on the surface, I believe it's 28F. As the boiling point of water increases with pressure, does the freezing point? Or is it just barely above freezing at the wreck site?
While I have laid out a lot of odd questions here, I have no idea at all if these are just odd questions that nobody has ever asked before, or if someone asked them and found out the answers to them and published them in a scientific paper that I have not the training to even understand the title of.
Anyone?
Any additional info will also be welcomed. 
