Imagine you are inside cabin E162 just as the lights went out. You are leaning against the forward bulkhead,(wall),as it is now quickly becoming the floor of your cabin. Your respiratory system is at maximum from sheer anxiety. Your heart rate is at maximum for the same reason. You can't see anything in the darkness. Your hear a roar of noise that is growing louder by the second.
If you could see out of your cabin's porthole, you would notice the ocean's surface swiftly pass by, like the floor of a hotel when seen from a glass elevator going down. Instantly you would have felt disorientation as the cabin began to tilt and rotate in several directions. You may have been rolled onto the other walls or even the ceiling. Within a couple of seconds of submersion you would feel the air pressure increase dramatically, affecting your respiration and inner ears. Loose items in your cabin would be tossed around the room along with you and depending on size or shape, could have caused injuries such as lacerations, blunt trauma, twisted joints and broken bones.
Very soon after submersion the walls of your cabin would have began to loose structural integrity as the violent destruction of support columns and joists farther forward migrated back to your cabin. The result would have been cracks in the floors, ceilings and walls. The walls may even seperate completely from themselves and from the floor and ceiling. Your cabin would begin to tear itself apart.
Moments later an explosion of freezing sea water would have blasted into your cabin, dislodging walls, plumbing, and everything else in its path. Your body, already stressed physically and emotionally, would have been dislodged as well from whatever solid object it was resting on at that moment. In the violent, destructive flurry of furniture, glass, cloth, wood, and steel you would have been swirled around and then pinned with crushing strength in the wreckage.
Now three things would have happened to end your life at this point.
First, you could easily have been crushed by the wreckage swirling around you. Much like a bug in a wheelbarrow full of bricks being dumped out. In this case your end would have been instantaneous.
Second, you could have survived the initial flooding of your cabin, only to find yourself tangled in the debris floating everywhere. The water pressure would almost immediately force all the air out of your lungs, and implode your eardrums. You probably would not notice the freezing temperature of the water around you. In this case, you could have lived for a short time before you went unconcious from lack of oxygen.
You would have died quickly afterward as your heart went into arrest, and your brain activity stopped soon thereafter.
Lastly, you could have died when your brain simply shut down from exessive stress. That is you pass out from emotional trauma. In this case, like that above, your body would meet its end from lack of air, but without all the struggling to escape.
In any case, you would not have survived the trip to the bottom past about a couple thousand feet deep. Once dead, your remains would have floated inside the wreck as it descended downward. As the stern continued to break apart on the way down, stong currents of water would be swirling inside the wreck. It's possible that your body would have been caught up in a current of water and swept about inside the stern along with other debris items. Many of these items were blown out of the stern as it sank. Your body may have also been picked up by water and pushed outside the hull through an opening. If this happened, your body would have already been fully invaded by the seawater and thus would likely have continued to sink down to the sea bed, although much slower than the heavier pieces.
On the way down, sea creatures may have encountered your body and consumed it, or carried it off for consumption later. Or it could have eventually sank all the way to the bottom and landed gently in the sea mud, where it would be quickly decomposed.
Of course your body could easily have remained tangled in the wreckage inside the stern all the way to the bottom. Upon impact, a repeat of the violent swirling of debris and water would have occurred just as when your cabin was flooded near the surface. This second wave of destruction would cause further damage to your body as entire decks collapsed and walls fell flat. Dismemberment of your remains would be likely.
Once at the bottom, items would begin to settle into their final resting places. Heavy items drifting down to the lowest point inside the wreck. Any boyant items still trapped inside would continue to rest at the highest points inside the wreck. Your remains would have came to rest at the bottom of the wreck, along with the other non-boyant items.
If your body was still deep inside the wreck, away from sea creatures, or the acidic mud, then your remains would decompose at a much slower rate than the bodies lying outside the wreck.
Perhaps your bones would still be present some years later. But as the steel of the wreck became covered in rust, your remains would also become covered in silt, and rust.
90 years later, all that would be left of you would be any rust-proof jewelry, or metal objects you wore. Perhaps the shoes on your feet would still be found. But any organic material that once was your body would be long gone. Returned to the sea.
Gruesome, but complex and fascinating. Not the type thing to dwell on, especially regarding a loved one. I drew most of this description from a documentary I saw about crab fishermen who worked in Alaska. Their biggest fear and danger, is to be tangled in the lines attached to the crab pot (trap) and be swept overboard along with the pot. The steel pot weighs a couple hundred pounds and sinks to the bottom in about 5 minutes. The depth there is about 600 feet. They actually made a dramatization of such an accident which stated the details about how the fisherman would perish in such an accident. In their reproduction of the event, the conclusion was that the man would probably not be alive when the pot hit bottom.
Really makes me want to be a crab fisherman. Not.
Yuri
