Thoughts for the day -- Pearl Harbor

Zaphod
Thu, 07 Dec 2006 20:49:32 +0000

Oil is much more boyant than water. When you add up the volume of oil, the bouyancy force can be pretty considerable.

Seawater, OTOH, would provide no support at all, so while the oil remains in sufficient volume, the integrity of the hull is helped.

Of course, at this point so many different variables get thrown into the mix that predictions become the baliwick of real naval architects (of which I am not one). How much oil was originally in the tanks? How much burned? How much has leaked out and at what rate? Do ships sailing by on their way into and out of the harbor produce enough suction and turbulence to affect the flow and/or the wreck itself? etc., etc., etc…

Frankly, I wonder what 65 years of immersion in salt water has done to the oil itself. I can’t imagine it’s in the same condition it was when she went down. Sure, it floats and all, but how much of it has broken down over the years?

Either way, I hope they let her rest where she sank, and if the harbor reclaims her, then so be it. Let nature take its course and let the wreck collapse if it has to. It won’t change the significance of the site one bit.

I have to admit that the story above that said the memorial was sinking, too, was a shocker. I’d never heard that.



We visited Pearl Harbor on one of the days they were filming the Ben Affleck movie “Pearl Harbor”. It was very weird standing on the Arizona Memorial and the USS Missouri while Japanese torpedo planes and fighters with their big red “meatballs” on the wings and fuselage



Yeesh. I’ll bet it was!