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On Wednesday afternoon, off the coast of Florida, one of the most famous ships ever built began to sink — on purpose. The SS United States, a 990-foot ocean liner longer than the Titanic and still the fastest passenger ship ever to cross the Atlantic, is being deliberately flooded in the Gulf of Mexico to become the world's largest artificial reef.
It is the end of a 75-year story that began with post-war glamour, passed through three decades of rusting neglect, and now finishes as an underwater habitat for tuna, marlin and swordfish — and a Mount Everest-type destination for scuba divers.
The fastest ship that ever crossed the Atlantic
The SS United States was launched in 1951 and set a transatlantic speed record in 1952 that still stands. At 990 feet from stem to stern, she is more than 100 feet longer than the ill-fated RMS Titanic, and she carried presidents and celebrities across the Atlantic in high-class style. She was a marvel of post-Second World War engineering — and then, almost overnight, she became obsolete. Retired from service in 1969 as commercial air travel took over, she sat moored in Philadelphia for nearly 30 years, seemingly destined to be sold for scrap.
Her rescue came from an unlikely place: Okaloosa County, Florida. The county bought the vessel in October 2024 for $10.1 million as part of a roughly $13 million project, then had her towed to a shipyard in Mobile, Alabama, where she was prepared for disposal at sea. The plan is to turn her into what the county bills as the world's largest artificial reef — joining more than 500 smaller underwater sites that already make the Destin-Fort Walton Beach area a divers' haven.
How do you sink a ship on purpose?
Federal rules bar explosives, so the sinking is a slow, controlled flooding. Workers spent a year preparing the vessel: tanks connected to its seawater system were removed, large openings were cut into its decks, and more than 400 portholes were taken out. The ship's two smokestacks were removed, and the vessel was towed out to sea for its final voyage, surrounded by tugboats, safety crews and dozens of onlookers in recreational boats.
The operation began at about 1 p.m. Central Time on Wednesday, November 11, a day earlier than planned because of concerns over worsening weather. All valves were opened to let seawater flood the hull, and crews aboard departed the vessel. The process is so slow that as the sun set, most of the hull was still above the surface. Once the descent begins in earnest, the ship is expected to take about 45 minutes to reach the bottom.
The sinking was not without a last-minute legal fight: a lawsuit seeking to halt it was denied by US District Judge M. Casey Rodgers on November 6, clearing the way for the deployment.
What happens on the seabed
If all goes as planned, the aging liner will come to rest upright on the Gulf floor at a depth of about 180 feet, roughly 22 nautical miles southwest of Destin, Florida. Her upper deck is expected to sit about 50 to 60 feet beneath the surface — shallow enough for experienced recreational divers to reach. Recreational divers are expected to be able to visit from dawn on Thursday, November 12, provided the deployment goes as planned.
Once submerged, she will be the largest artificial reef in the world. The second-largest, the USS Oriskany, lies only about 12 to 13 nautical miles away off Pensacola, and officials say the two wrecks together will anchor a world-class diving destination. Researchers from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution will collect water samples around the ship to study changes in water chemistry, microbial activity and biological colonisation as marine life moves in.
For the ship's supporters, the sinking is not a burial but a second life. A vessel built to carry the rich and famous across the Atlantic at unmatched speed will spend its next decades carrying coral, fish and divers instead — the fastest ocean liner in history, finally at rest, and finally useful again. For more on humanity's reach into extreme environments, see how NASA's twin ESCAPADE probes slingshotted around Earth to reach Mars and how a robot built a structure in space without astronauts. According to reports from Reuters and USA Today, the ship began sinking on Wednesday afternoon.