Deterioration of Metals in Underwater Environments & Emergency Treatments and Storage

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Deterioration of Metals in Underwater Environments & Emergency Treatments and Storage

When excavating many things have to be taken into consideration, these artifacts have been resting in their own microclimate. Changing these conditions of humidity, temperature, and presence of light may destroy the artifact completely. So when packing and transporting. These conditions have to be kept constant. Even when an artifact is in a safe location such as a museum store these conditions still have to be kept until conservation takes place.

“The conservator, by contrast, is looking for an indefinite lifetime for the treated artifact,

Is concened with both preventing new corrosion and preserving or reversing that which has already occurred and generally cannot simply replace objects that have corroded too far to be conveniently treated.
In addition the conservator is often  required to preserve not only the metal in the artifact but also the corrosion products. With metals such as bronze, cast iron, and silver this corrosion layer may take the shape of the original object very well, and often surface markings, originally in the metal itself are preserved only in the corrosion layer.”

  • The removal of concretion may take place either on site or at the conservation laboratory.

  • In the case of the former some concretion removal may have to be done on site. There are two reasons for this:
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  1. if these artifacts have to be stored for weeks, before conservation commences it is much easier and safer to separate the wide variety of concreted artifacts which are made from different materials. Very often different metals in an electrolyte solution such as sea water cause a chemical-electrical reaction, which corrodes the metal.
  2. Secondly it is also much cheaper to transport smaller items than a large concreted block.

On the other hand concretions can also serve as a protection to the artifact, in the case of cast iron cannons  the concretion protects it from physical and ...

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