The Scientist - USA (2020-11)

14 THE SCIENTIST | the-scientist.com

Notebook

Sunken

Microbial

Treasure

A

rmed with a battery-powered

underwater drill, maritime

archaeologist Nathan Rich-

ards ducked his face into the Atlantic

Ocean. It was a sunny afternoon in Sep-

tember 2017, and Richards was stand-

ing in waist-deep water atop a wrecked

ship called the Pappy Lane, which ran

aground off the coast of North Carolina

in the 1960s. With students looking on,

Richards peered through his mask and

skillfully applied pressure to push the

1.5-inch circular drill bit into the ship’s

steel hull under his feet. As the direc-

tor of maritime studies at East Carolina

University (ECU), Richards had studied

hundreds of shipwrecks over the years,

and had even drilled core samples of

some, but this was the first time he’d

gone in search of microbes.

Richards has been interested in this

particular wreck for the better part of the

past decade. His exhaustive investigation—

funded primarily by the North Carolina

Department of Transportation because a

planned bridge project would run right by

the wreck—revealed it to be an amphibi-

ous assault vessel from the Second World

War that had apparently been converted to

an oil barge before being intentionally run

aground to help rescue some other barges

stranded in a storm.

Despite having been sitting on the

seafloor for just half a century, the wreck

is extremely corroded compared with

other sunken vessels in the area, Richards

notes. Like many marine archaeologists,

he has studied the galvanic corrosion

known to occur on shipwrecks as the

boats’ metals exchange electrons with

one another once submerged in the con-

ductive seawater. “But that’s an electro-

chemical process that doesn’t really take

into account all that much microbes....

NOVEMBER 2020

SHIPWRECK MICROBIOLOGY: Microbiologist

Erin Field (center) holds a shipwreck core that

maritime archaeologist Nathan Richards (left)

drilled from the hull of the Pappy Lane, while

Field’s student Kyra Price holds a sterile bag

for its collection.

JOHN MCCORD, UNC COASTA L

STUDIES INSTITUTE