Ever since the Titanic sank in 1912, people have been figuring out how to raise it from the bottom.

“But it will never work,” Daniel Stone said in Sinkable: Obsession, the Deep Sea, and Shipwreck of the Titanic. “Not only is the exposed steel at the top of the nose too fragile for even the most meticulous crane work, but the dirt has been acting like a deep-sea swamp for longer than most people have ever experienced.”

The lack of structural integrity is just one of the three main reasons why the Titanic is doomed to sink forever.

1. The place where the Titanic fell is a tomb

About 1,500 people died when the Titanic sank. After the ship sank, the boats collected more than 300 bodies. While some of the life-vest passengers could be swept away by the current, others sank with the ship.

The US and British governments have agreed to designate the sunken ship as a place of remembrance. “NOAA recognizes the Titanic Wreck Site as a Maritime Monument and supports Article 4(1) of the RMS Titanic Wreck Agreement, which states that the site will be preserved, not salvaged,” said NOAA Director of Research Monica Allen. public relations, Insider said in an email.

In 2020, RMS Titanic Inc., which owns the rights to salvage the ship, planned to purchase a radio station used for distress calls. This plan sparked a debate about the expedition’s ability to disturb human remains. Some claimed that the animals and salt water completely disintegrated the bodies, CBS News reported.

“I didn’t see any human remains,” James Cameron, a filmmaker who has visited the site dozens of times, told The New York Times in 2012.

For some, with or without remains, the wreckage is a sign of tragedy. Many descendants of the dead consider this place a tomb. Eva Hart, who survived the Titanic in 1987, called the survivors “fortune hunters, vultures, pirates”.

2. The wreck of the Titanic is getting worse

According to the Materials Today report, the Titanic was built with thousands of 2.5-centimeter-thick steel plates and two million steel and wrought-iron rivets.

The bacterium Halomonas titanicae, named after the ship, “works in symbiosis to feed on iron and sulfur,” microbial biologist Lori Johnston told USA Today.

When bacteria absorb the ship’s iron, they form rustics that look like stalactites lining the ship.

Claire Fitzsimmons of Newcastle University told the BBC in 2019 that rustic is a “much weaker form of metal” that is so fragile that it turns to dust. Ocean currents and salt corrosion also suffered over time.

The extent of the Titanic’s destruction is evident when comparing images of Captain Edward Smith’s cabin from 1996 to 2019.

“The captain’s tub is a beloved image among Titanic aficionados and it no longer exists,” Titanic historian Parks Stevenson said in 2019. “That hole in the deck over there is collapsing, taking the cabins with it, and the deterioration will continue to progress.”

3. The cost of upgrading the Titanic would be huge

Ambitious Titanic enthusiasts have dreamed of ways to raise the ship since 1914, when engineer Charles Smith devised a plan to attach electromagnetic cables to the hull and gradually raise it using steam engines and winches, Sinkable said.

He estimated the cost at the time to be $1.5 million, compared to about $45 million today.

Lifting the Costa Concordia cruise ship, which capsized in 2013, cost $800 million AtlantiA. This ship was only partially submerged, so raising the Titanic would have been much more difficult and expensive.

Although the site is a monument, some artifacts have been recovered from the wreck. Any salvage area is limited to the debris field surrounding the two hulls and must comply with NOAA guidelines, international treaty, and federal regulations.

But revealing the Titanic in mid-air brings its own problems for the ship.

For example, two attempts were made to bring the so-called “large piece” of the Titanic to the surface, the first in 1996 and the second two years later. According to SF Gate, some bronze portholes still had rivets and glass in the 13 by 30 feet (4 by 9 m) and 15-ton hull section.

The seafloor is a low-oxygen environment, so the piece had to be returned to the water during shipping to slow the wear process. The hull piece was then submerged in an above-ground pool filled with a solution of sodium carbonate and water for 20 months to remove salts that weaken the metal. This “big piece” of Titanic is currently on display at the Luxor Hotel in Las Vegas.