TITANIC FOUND ON 1985 SEPTEMBER 1 AT 12.48 A.M

TITANIC FOUND ON 1985 SEPTEMBER 1 AT 12.48 A.M



The wreck of the RMS Titanic is located about 370 miles (600 km) south-southeast off the coast of Newfoundland, lying at a depth of about 12,500 feet (3,800 m). The liner sunk in 1912, when it hit an iceberg during her maiden voyage.

The wreck lies in two main pieces about a third of a mile (600 m) apart. The bow is still largely recognizable, in spite of its deterioration and the damage it suffered hitting the sea floor, and has a great deal of preserved interiors. The stern is completely ruined due to the damage it suffered while sinking 12,000 feet (3,700 m) and hitting the ocean floor, and is now just a heap of twisted metal, which may explain why it has barely been explored during expeditions to the Titanic wreck

Salvage proposals in the 1960s and 1970s[edit]

Titanic surfacing in the film Raise the Titanic

In the mid-1960s, a hosiery worker from Baldock named Douglas Woolley devised a plan to find Titanic using a bathyscaphe (like Trieste, used to reach the bottom of the Mariana Trench in 1960) and raise the wreck by inflating nylon balloons that would be attached to her hull.[9] The declared objective was to "bring the wreck into Liverpool and convert it to a floating museum."[10] 

The Titanic Salvage Company was established to manage the scheme and a group of businessmen from West Berlin set up an entity called Titanic-Tresor to support it financially.[9] It fell apart when its proponents found they could not overcome the problem of how the balloons would be inflated in the first place. Calculations showed that it could take ten years to generate enough gas to overcome the water pressure.[11]

A variety of audacious but equally impractical schemes were put forward during the 1970s. One proposal called for 180,000 tons of molten wax (or alternatively, Vaseline) to be pumped into Titanic, lifting her to the surface.[12] Another proposal involved filling Titanic with ping-pong balls, but overlooked the fact that the balls would be crushed by the pressure long before reaching the depth of the wreck.[13] A similar idea involving the use of Benthos glass spheres,[a] which could survive the pressure, was scuppered when the cost of the number of spheres required was put at over $238 million.[12] 

An unemployed haulage contractor from Walsall named Arthur Hickey proposed to turn Titanic into an iceberg, freezing the water around the wreck to encase it in a buoyant jacket of ice. This, being lighter than liquid water, would float to the surface and could be towed to shore. The BOC Group calculated that this would require half a million tons of liquid nitrogen to be pumped down to the sea bed.[14] In his 1976 thriller Raise the Titanic!, author Clive Cussler's hero Dirk Pitt repairs the holes in Titanic's hull, pumps it full of compressed air and succeeds in making it "leap out of the waves like a modern submarine blowing its ballast tanks", a scene depicted on the posters of the subsequent film of the book. Although this was an "artistically stimulating" highlight of the film,[15] made using a 55 ft (17 m) model of Titanic, it would not have been physically possible.[16] At the time of the book's writing, it was still believed that she sank in one piece.

Robert Ballard of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution had long been interested in finding Titanic. 

Although early negotiations with possible backers were abandoned when it emerged that they wanted to turn the wreck into souvenir paperweights, more sympathetic backers joined Ballard to form a company named Seasonics International Ltd as a vehicle for rediscovering and exploring Titanic. In October 1977 he made his first attempt to find the ship with the aid of the Alcoa corporation's deep sea salvage vessel Seaprobe. 

This was essentially a drillship with sonar equipment and cameras attached to the end of the drilling pipe. It could lift objects from the seabed using a remote-controlled mechanical claw.[17] The expedition ended in failure when the drilling pipe broke, sending 3,000 feet (910 m) of pipe and $600,000 worth of electronics plunging to the sea bed.[17]

In 1978, The Walt Disney Company and National Geographic magazine considered mounting a joint expedition to find Titanic, using the aluminium submersible Aluminaut. Titanic would have been well within the submersible's depth limits, but the plans were abandoned for financial reasons.[9]

The following year, the British billionaire financier and tycoon Sir James Goldsmith set up Seawise & Titanic Salvage Ltd with the involvement of underwater diving and photographic experts. His aim was to use the publicity of finding Titanic to promote his newly established magazine, NOW!. An expedition to the North Atlantic was scheduled for 1980 but was cancelled due to financial difficulties.[9]

 A year later, NOW! folded after 84 issues with Goldsmith incurring huge financial losses.[18]

Fred Koehler, an electronics repairman from Coral Gables, Florida, sold his electronics shop to finance the completion of a two-man deep-sea submersible called Seacopter. He planned to dive to Titanic, enter the hull and retrieve a fabulous collection of diamonds rumored to be contained in the purser's safe. However, he was unable to obtain financial backing for his planned expedition.[19] 

Another proposal involved using a semi-submersible platform mounted with cranes, resting on two watertight supertankers, that would winch the wreck off the seabed and carry it to shore. A proponent was quoted as saying, "It's like the Great Wall of China – given enough time and money and people, you can do anything." Time, money and people were not forthcoming and the proposal got no further than any of its predecessors



Jack Grimm's expeditions, 1980–83[edit]

On 17 July 1980, an expedition sponsored by Texan oilman Jack Grimm set off from Port Everglades, Florida, in the research vessel H.J.W. Fay. Grimm had previously sponsored expeditions to find Noah's Ark, the Loch Ness Monster, Bigfoot, and the giant hole in the North Pole predicted by the pseudoscientific Hollow Earth hypothesis. To raise funds for his Titanic expedition, he obtained sponsorship from friends with whom he played poker, sold media rights through the William Morris Agency, commissioned a book, and obtained the services of Orson Welles to narrate a documentary. 

He acquired scientific support from Columbia University by donating $330,000 to the Lamont–Doherty Geological Observatory for the purchase of a wide-sweep sonar, in exchange for five years' use of the equipment and the services of technicians to support it. Drs. William B. Ryan of Columbia University and Fred Spiess of Scripps Institution of Oceanography in California joined the expedition as consultants.[21] 

They nearly stayed ashore when Grimm introduced them to a new consultant – a monkey called Titan, which was trained to point at a spot on the map to supposedly indicate where Titanic was. The scientists issued an ultimatum: "It's either us or the monkey." Grimm preferred the monkey, but was prevailed upon to leave it behind and bring the scientists instead.[22]

The results were inconclusive, as three weeks of surveying in almost continuous bad weather during July and August 1980 failed to find Titanic. The problem was exacerbated by technological limitations; the Sea MARC sonar used by the expedition had a relatively low resolution and was a new and untested piece of equipment. It was nearly lost only 36 hours after it was first deployed when the tail was ripped off during a sharp turn, destroying the magnetometer, which would have been vital for detecting Titanic's hull. Nonetheless it managed to survey an area of some 500 square nautical miles and identified 14 possible targets.[22]

Grimm mounted a second expedition in June 1981 aboard the research vessel Gyre, with Spiess and Ryan again joining the expedition. To increase their chances of finding the wreck, the team employed a much more capable sonar device, the Scripps Deep Tow. The weather was again very poor, but all 14 of the targets were successfully covered and found to be natural features. On the last day of the expedition, an object that looked like a propeller was found.[23] Grimm announced on his return to Boston that Titanic had been found, but the scientists declined to endorse his identification.[24]

In July 1983, Grimm went back a third time with Ryan aboard the research vessel Robert D. Conrad to have another look at the "propeller". This time nothing was found and very bad weather brought an early end to the expedition. It later turned out that Sea MARC had actually passed over Titanic but had failed to detect it,[24] while Deep Tow passed within 1.5 miles (2.4 km) of the wreck.[25]


Discovery[edit]

Dr. Robert D. Ballard, the discoverer of the wreck of Titanic in September 1985

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.[24] 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-massive 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,[26] on condition that it was to be used to carry out a number of programmes – many still classified – for the Navy.[27]

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.[28] 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 feet (3,000 m).[29] 

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.[30]

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.[29] As Harris/Grimm's unsuccessful efforts had taken more than forty days,[24] Ballard decided that extra help would be needed. He approached the French national oceanographic agency, IFREMER, with which Woods Hole had previously collaborated. 

SOME HUMAN REMAINS NOW ON THE BOTTOM OF SEA

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.[31] 

The French team spent five weeks, from 5 July to 12 August 1985, "mowing the lawn" – sailing back and forth across the 150-square-mile (390 km2) 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.[32]

Ballard realized 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,[33] 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 a mile (1.6 km) or longer, whereas Titanic itself was only 90 feet (27 m) wide.[34] 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.[35] 

BOILER OF TITANIC FIRST SEEN

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.[36] 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.[37] The discovery made headlines around the world.[3