Niagara Shipwrecks

The Niagara

Shipwrecks. They have become some of the best habitats for marine life in the areas they were wrecked, but how are they still here now? Over a few centuries, the ship should have decayed enough for the wood to have broken and the iron to have rusted away. Well, over the course of the next 5 minutes we will be looking at the life of the Niagara and how it sunk, and also the chemistry behind how the Niagara has been preserved over the past hundred years.

The Niagara was first built in 1872 by the Detroit Dry Dock Company as Hull No. 21 of their fleet of logging ships. It was built for the propose of rafting logs up and down the river their supposed destinations. On the evening of Saturday, on the 4th of June 1904, the Niagara was headed to Duluth from Sault Ste. Marie to tow marine construction equipment to Lake Huron. Due to the heavy seas and poor whether the crew had trouble controlling the ship which helped cause the crash. Apparently the compass on board was malfunctioning due to the magnetic attraction of the shoreline and the ship was in the breakers before the island was even seen. It captain immediately put the ship into reverse but was driven onto the rocks by the trailing sea and winds. The

One of the major causes of corrosion is seawater. Due to the salinity of the sea water the corrosion process speeds up exponentially compared to just oxygen in the air. This can be seen when ships are exposed to the air compared to when they are onto the exposed to water sources or humid climates. A way to slow the process of corrosion down is by “galvanising” a metal. Galvanizing is the process of coating a metal with a low electronegativity with a coating of a metal with a higher electronegativity. The can be seen when iron is coated in zinc. This process is efficient by comes with the prices of losing the zinc due to the fact that the zinc will oxidizes instead of the iron