One chemical reaction could turn a massive vessel to nothing if not protected.
In the years spent among the fish in the sea, the cellulose in wood has already begun to break down, and the only thing that’s holding the ship and it’s wooden bits together now is the sticky water in between its cells. “The problem is when you bring up the wood, it’s been impregnated by water for so long, so it’s actually swelled a bit,” says Mark Schwartz, a professor of anthropology at Grand Valley State University who has investigated shipwrecks in the Great Lakes.
“Now in the Vasa, there’s practically two tons of sulfuric acid. If the reaction starts, in a very few days, the wood can just crumble and dust,” says Claudia Mondelli, a physicist at the Institut Laue-Langevin in Grenoble, France.
Not to mention, rescuing a sunken ship is an enormously expensive endeavor. After all, filling a pool of special chemicals to bathe massive artifacts in order to age, analyze, photograph, or rebuild them for a museum, is no simple task.
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