Sinking Ships To Build Coral Reefs | The Blue Realm | Real Wild

They're floating junk yards...mothballed, decommissioned naval vessels, rotting away in dockyards around the world. Cutting them up for scrap is expensive, and leaving them to fall apart where they are is an ecological nightmare. Sounds like a job for...The Shipsinkers.
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[@iteerrex8166]

SO its more expansive to cut up a sitting piece of iron, then to go through the WHOLE process of mining and refining it? Is there some politics going on here?

[@zarahalora7567]

im with ya buddy

[@alexanderstone9463]

There’s a reason they do this mostly with warships and in a sense you’re right, it’s absolutely politics. You’re crazy if you think that the United States is going to send a navy ship, even a decrepit one, to some third world country to be cut up. Even the hull of the ship has information that could be used by our enemies. No, it must be done at home or in an allied nation. We are not the only nation that thinks this way either, a lot of other countries do as well.
So where does that leave us? Well, we can either pay through the nose to send it to a scrapyard in the USA or an allied NATO member. You know, one that respects stuff like the “health and safety” of their workers and sh%t (as opposed to whatever they usually do in Chittagong). Or we could turn it into an artificial reef.

[@iteerrex8166]

@@alexanderstone9463 Even if we do it ourselves, itll be cheaper and take less time, than to find, mine, refine and transport it. Not to mention the environmental cost of each step.

[@alexanderstone9463]

Do you have number to back this up though? Because I’m not convinced of this.
I have considered a few other motivations. Fisherman sometimes (though not always) appreciate artificial reefs because they raise yields of certain types of fish in their vicinity. However high the quality of marine steel usually is, it’s still been in salt water, so perhaps it’s not as good as other sources of steel, though that’s just aimless speculation that I could be wrong about.
Ultimately you’d think that there would actually be a little MORE political motivation to scrap it here rather than to sink it, NOT less. Unless the cost was prohibitive. After all, the steel smelting industry has extensive political clout in the US, enough to get both political parties to protect it from international competition (fair or unfair), and protect itself from complete dissolution. You would think that they’d have more to gain by promoting the reuse of the scrap metal in our naval ships. Unless of course, the current cost of scrapping a navy ship here is too high to make it always worthwhile.

[@iteerrex8166]

@@alexanderstone9463 No, but it makes sense. Here’s a chunk of iron on the beach, or it’s halfway around the world, underground, in the form of deposits.

[@kiwiboy9526]

should give it to the homeless idk

[@troyedwards5233]

kiwi boy
So they can make it more toxic? They don't care about themselves, they don't care about us. They want to destroy everything around them. Bad idea.

[@alexanderstone9463]

Oh yes! Let’s house the homeless in dangerous rusty old ships filled with contaminants! What could possibly go wrong?
Why the f%ck does this crap get upvoted? Is this some sort of dark and morbid conservative fantasy to drown the homeless or poison them?

[@zarahalora7567]

Imagine when ships sink and theirs people inside .like the titanic or the mysterious ship disappearance in the Bermuda triangle..thats sad

[@PotooBurd]

I may have missed something here, but... From the first 3 min I have gleaned that-
(Problem) Old ship leaks toxins into the ocean, (Response) Let's hit it with some soap and then blow it up in said ocean

[@alexanderstone9463]

The whole reason why we started doing this in the first place was not merely because it was cheaper. But because we had so frequently observed that ships sunk in war or in an accident had turned into vibrant reefs that were full of sealife. This would happen despite those ships never being decontaminated at all. The sealife of those wrecks didn’t care any more about the contaminants than the wildlife of Chernobyl does for the radiation. Therefore, it is not for the benefit of sea life that we decontaminate ships destined to be artificial reefs, but for the benefit or fisherman who might wish to fish in the vicinity, and for environmentalists who consider everything we put in the ocean to be “contamination” and “pollution” for philosophical reasons that have nothing to do with whether or not the contaminants in question are actually harmful.
Anyone reading this comment who doubts this fact is encouraged to search for the “USS Independence” on TH-cam. It was an aircraft carrier that served in the Second World War and survived it, only to be marked for destruction in a nuclear test at sea. Amazingly, the ship not only survived the initial blast, but was in good enough condition that the navy thought it could tow it back to its port in the San Francisco Bay. But just before it got there, it finally sank, in the vicinity of the Farallon Islands off the coast of California. It sank in deep water and was not visited again until more than sixty years later. I’ve never seen so many sea sponges in one place in my entire life, as you will too if you see pictures of the wreck online. It was literally as if a sea mount had dropped on the ocean floor. Evidently the sea had apparently also diluted quite a bit of the radiation, though I reckon quite a few of those sponges took root well before the sea got rid of the radiation. Regardless, the point still stands, what you think is “pollution” and what wildlife thinks is “pollution” are not always the same thing.
It’s not hard to see why sealife flourishes around shipwrecks. Sessile sealife, an incredibly important part of the marine food chain, will attach to absolutely anything with a hard surface, yet the ocean is relentless in pounding the seafloor into particles that cannot host sessile creatures (hence the importance of seamounts). But we humans, particularly in the era before modern navigation, but even to this day, are relentless in our absentminded-ness to sink our own ships, usually for foolish reasons like “he was an enemy” or “just one more voyage” or “I can catch fish in a storm no problem” or “What are you talking about? Of course this ship is seaworthy!” you get the idea. Anyways, while our foolishness so frequently damages the earth, here it is clearly does the opposite, we are literally dropping seamounts on an ocean floor that’s usually an ecological desert to begin with, and certainly not in short supply (like I said the ocean is relentless in pounding everything that enters it into particulates). I wouldn’t be surprised if the sole reason for some species survival was because of this entirely accidental “mitigation” we’ve been doin in the deep sea.

[@dbx1233]

I thought loose lips sank ships?

[@Clipper282]

How would someone go about getting a job doing this kind of work.

[@Finesser-94]

I would think ziprecruiter

[@benjaminmartinez4001]

hahaha@@Finesser-94

[@MeleeTiger]

Turning weapons of war into tranquil homes is a heart warming sentiment.

[@johnleach7879]

"You're a better man than I.....". That oft repeated line encapulates my feelings toward intentionally sinking any ship, especially one with a cherished or hard-won name. Sorry, it's emotionally beyond me. A ship, to me, lives.

[@Snipergoat1]

And like other life, its death will then feed new life.