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"Oh, better that her shattered hulk

Should sink beneath the wave;

Her thunders shook the mighty deep,

And there should be her grave;

Nail to the mast her holy flag,

Set every threadbare sail,

And give her to the god of storms,

The lightning and the gale!"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_Ironsides_(poem)

Incase anyone was unaware part of the consideration for where to sink it is access for divers -- the top will be around 55ft deep which will make it accessible for recreational divers

Was strangely difficult to find on Wikipedia what the "SS" actually means

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Screw_steamer

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ship_prefix

It's a sad day. I crossed the Atlantic in it long ago. Some great memories.

If this is interesting to you, there's still one ocean liner left: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Queen_Mary_2

Buy a ticket while you can.

Only love from all the Philadelphians who have sat eating Swedish meatballs and looking at it in wonder. Will be dearly missed

This podcast entry has more about the ship's history https://www.omnibusproject.com/episodes/ss-united-states-ent...

Why are we sinking huge amounts of already processed resources... yes theres cost but, thats a lot of steel, copper, brass who knows what else. So crazy and ridiculous to me

Most of the comments here mention divers, I would have expected thus to be focused on fishing. When I lived on the gulf coasts there were quite a few sunken ships marked as common fishing spots.

I wish they could have left her funnels on to sink with the rest of the ship. I suspect if they did the tops would be too shallow and a hazard to navigation. Or maybe they didn’t want them to rust and fall unexpectedly on some divers.

A bittersweet end. The SS United States was a magnificent-looking ship.

Would a metall ship, that is artificially erroded a a solar driven scarficial annode, count as geo-engineering, when the resulting algea bloom fell out over a dead spot of the ocean?

I'm sure a Youtuber could have saved it :)

Hasn't this been the plan for years now?

Headed for Davey Jones' Locker.

Ikea in south philly will never be the same :<

Beautiful ship, that’s going to be awesome to dive on.

Th SS United States going into the Gulf of Mexico.

It would be funny if Mexico started calling it "el arrecife del imperio moribundo"

"The Reef of a Dying Empire"

Over the past 9 years, my genealogical research has taken me to some interesting places. Among other discoveries, I found that I have 5 grandfathers. One of my "surprise" grandfathers brought his family over from Scotland on the USS Leviathan. Now, the interesting part about gigantic ocean liners is that they often have Wikipedia pages about them, and this was no exception: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SS_Vaterland_(1913)

So it turned out that the Leviathan had belonged to Germany under a different name, until it was seized by the USA during WWI. It was very interesting to discover all these facts about a vessel that is an intrinsic part of my quite recent family history, that was completely unknown to me, being adopted, until the miracle of DNA and digging into available public records began to reveal it all.

Feels relevant:

> The essential act of war is destruction, not necessarily of human lives, but of the products of human labour. War is a way of shattering to pieces, or pouring into the stratosphere, or sinking in the depths of the sea, materials which might otherwise be used to make the masses too comfortable, and hence, in the long run, too intelligent. Even when weapons of war are not actually destroyed, their manufacture is still a convenient way of expending labour power without producing anything that can be consumed. A Floating Fortress, for example, has locked up in it the labour that would build several hundred cargo-ships. Ultimately it is scrapped as obsolete, never having brought any material benefit to anybody, and with further enormous labours another Floating Fortress is built.

From George Orwell's 1984.

Why was it using asbestos?

Other than it changing hands a couple of times and it languishing for decades, both of which are pretty normal, the cleanup of the ship sounds largely successful. Almost like an example of how all cleanup projects should go.

Ain’t that symbolic.

We are running out of metaphors.

Well that's symbolic as heck. A component in a piece of ritual magic maybe. Somebody should feature it that way in a comic book.

Honestly read this as satirical after my brain inserted "intelligence" after reef. It certainly feels like that.

I've had a lot of chick-fil-a sitting in my car looking at this thing.

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i read "United States to be sunk as largest artificial reef" and thought, thats no news... /s

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They should sink the US as artificial reef.

> The SS United States, once the fastest passenger liner in the world, is scheduled to be sunk in the Gulf of Mexico in November, creating what will be the world’s largest artificial reef.

This sentence may anger someone into causing a controversy... hope this doesn't hit his favorite channels.