Scores of survivors

Today's the day 103 years ago that RMS Titanic plummeted nearly 4,000m down to the bottom of the ocean. I haven't seen the filum at least partly because I think yer man should change his name to Leonardo diCastanea because he is so wooden but acknowledge that the song is an effective <yorp> earworm <glark>.  About a year ago, I shared an analysis of the rates of survival amongst different classes of passengers in the sinking of the RMS Empress of Ireland, women and children didn't come out of that disaster well . . . or, indeed, alive.  The contemporary headline above claims a much more chivalrous outcome and the final tally from the British Board of Trade via Wikipedia seems to bear the headline out:

Group	Class	N	Live	Dead	%live	%dead
Children	First Class	6	5	1	83%	17%
	Second Class	24	24	0	100%	0%
	Third Class	79	27	52	34%	66%
Women	First Class	144	140	4	97%	3%
	Second Class	93	80	13	86%	14%
	Third Class	165	76	89	46%	54%
	Crew	23	20	3	87%	13%
Men	First Class	175	57	118	33%	67%
	Second Class	168	14	154	8%	92%
	Third Class	462	75	387	16%	84%
	Crew	885	192	693	22%	78%
Total		2224	710	1514	32%	68%

On the Empress of Ireland you were far better off if you were a) adult and b) bloke, but it's more or less the opposite on the Titanic. Of course your chances were much less if you were in steerage than if you were loaded into the lifeboat in silk pyjamas.  And that's a crucial difference between the Titanic and the Empress, the former went down within 15 minutes of the collision while the Titanic stayed afloat and more or less vertical for ten times as long.

The Titanic herself is not surviving so well, she is currently being consumed by Deferribacter autotrophicus, Shewanella profunda (don't you love the names?) and other iron-reducing bacteria that can make a living in profoundly adverse conditions - it's dark and cold down there.  But iron is a limiting resource in many oceanic environments and metabolising the hull will cause an increase in biomass in the deeps.