The Silver Spring Penguin

The RMS Titanic and 1,500 of her passengers rest at the bottom of the icy Atlantic. Once touted as unsinkable, ocean-dwelling bacteria now eat away at its iron wreckage.

“The whole ship looks like a melting birthday cake,” Fred Gurell, of NOAA, told The Penguin. He was one of several NOAA employees explaining things on Friday at the agency’s new exhibit, “Shipwrecks!”

Click here to view The Penguin’s images from “Shipwrecks!”

Click here to view NOAA’s images from “Shipwrecks!”

Explorations of Titanic served as oceanic autopsies for how and why an iceburg took her out almost a century ago, confirming survivors’ accounts. But explorations of other wrecks have actually reworked history, Gurell said.

For example, studies of a wrecked midget submarine off Oahu, Hawaii, showed historians that the 1941 Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor started sooner than previously thought. The small sub, fully armed with torpedoes, was taken out by the US navy one hour before the full Japanese assault, Gurnell explained.

However, the exhibit isn’t all doom and gloom. Displays depict how technology is being used to predict weather, prevent wrecks and rescue survivors. But the stories and images of wrecks take the cake.

“There’s more history on the bottom of the ocean than there is in all the world’s museums,” Gurell said.

“Shipwrecks!”, on display at the NOAA science center (1301 East-West Hwy) until Feb 10. A related series of free lectures runs every day this week.

Image of the sunken midget submarine courtesy of Wikipedia.

Updated Feb 7, 2008, at 4:00 p.m.