SECTION 4

The Official Story

THE WRECK OF THE TITANIC

The wreck of the RMS Titanic lies at a depth of about 12,500 feet (3.8 km; 2.37 mi), about 370 miles (600 km) south-southeast off the coast of Newfoundland. It lies in two main pieces about a third of a mile (600 m) apart. The bow is still recognisable with many preserved interiors, despite deterioration and damage sustained hitting the sea floor. In contrast, the stern is completely ruined. A debris field around the wreck contains hundreds of thousands of items spilled from the ship as she sank. The bodies of the passengers and crew would have also been distributed across the sea bed, but have been consumed by other organisms.

Titanic sank in 1912, when she collided with an iceberg during her maiden voyage. Numerous expeditions tried using sonar to map the sea bed in the hope of finding it, but were unsuccessful. In 1985, the wreck was finally located by a joint French–American expedition led by Jean-Louis Michel of IFREMER and Robert Ballard of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. The wreck has been the focus of intense interest and has been visited by numerous expeditions. Controversial salvage operations have recovered thousands of items, which have been conserved and put on public display.

Many schemes have been proposed to raise Titanic, including filling the wreck with ping-pong balls, injecting it with 180,000 tons of Vaseline, or using half a million tons of liquid nitrogen to encase it in an iceberg that would float to the surface. However, the wreck is too fragile to be raised and is now protected by a UNESCO convention.

Discovery

D. Michael Harris and Jack Grimm had failed to find Titanic but their expeditions did succeed in producing fairly detailed mapping of the area in which the ship had sunk. It was clear that the position given in Titanic‘s distress signals was inaccurate, which was a major expedition difficulty because it increased the search area’s already-expansive size. Despite the failure of his 1977 expedition, Robert Ballard had not given up hope and devised new technologies and a new search strategy to tackle the problem. The new technology was a system called Argo / Jason. This consisted of a remotely controlled deep-sea vehicle called Argo, equipped with sonar and cameras and towed behind a ship, with a robot called Jason tethered to it that could roam the sea floor, take close-up images and gather specimens. The images from the system would be transmitted back to a control room on the towing vessel where they could be assessed immediately. Although it was designed for scientific purposes, it also had important military applications and the United States Navy agreed to sponsor the system’s development, on condition that it was to be used to carry out a number of programmes—many still classified—for the Navy.

The Navy commissioned Ballard and his team to carry out a month-long expedition every year for four years, to keep Argo / Jason in good working condition. It agreed to Ballard’s proposal to use some of the time to search for Titanic once the Navy’s objectives had been met; the search would provide an ideal opportunity to test Argo / Jason. In 1984 the Navy sent Ballard and Argo to map the wrecks of the sunken nuclear submarines USS Thresher and USS Scorpion, lost in the North Atlantic at depths of up to 9,800 ft (3,000 m). The expedition found the submarines and made an important discovery. As Thresher and Scorpion sank, debris spilled out from them across a wide area of the seabed and was sorted by the currents, so that light debris drifted furthest away from the site of the sinking. This “debris field” was far larger than the wrecks themselves. By following the comet-like trail of debris, the main pieces of wreckage could be found.

A second expedition to map the wreck of Scorpion was mounted in 1985. Only twelve days of search time would be left at the end of the expedition to look for Titanic. As Harris/Grimm’s unsuccessful efforts had taken more than forty days, Ballard decided that extra help would be needed. He approached the French national oceanographic agency, IFREMER, with which Woods Hole had previously collaborated. The agency had recently developed a high-resolution side-scan sonar called SAR and agreed to send a research vessel, Le Suroît, to survey the sea bed in the area where Titanic was believed to lie. The idea was for the French to use the sonar to find likely targets, and then for the Americans to use Argo to check out the targets and hopefully confirm whether they were in fact the wreck. The French team spent five weeks, from 5 July to 12 August 1985, “mowing the lawn” – sailing back and forth across the 150-square-nautical-mile (510-square-kilometre) target area to scan the sea bed in a series of stripes. However, they found nothing; though it turned out that they had passed within a few hundred yards of Titanic in their first run.

Ballard realised that looking for the wreck itself using sonar was unlikely to be successful and adopted a different tactic, drawing on the experience of the surveys of Thresher and Scorpion; he would look for the debris field instead, using Argo‘s cameras rather than sonar. Whereas sonar could not distinguish man-made debris on the sea bed from natural objects, cameras could. The debris field would also be a far bigger target, stretching one nautical mile (1.9 kilometres) or longer, whereas Titanic itself was only 90 feet (27 m) wide. The search required round-the-clock towing of Argo back and forth above the sea bed, with shifts of watchers aboard the research vessel Knorr looking at the camera pictures for any sign of debris. After a week of fruitless searching, at 12.48 am on Sunday 1 September 1985, pieces of debris began to appear on Knorr‘s screens. One of them was identified as a boiler, identical to those shown in pictures from 1911. The following day, the main part of the wreck was found and Argo sent back the first pictures of Titanic since her sinking 73 years before. The discovery made headlines around the world.

Source: Wikipedia