How was the wreck of the Titanic discovered?
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The wreck of the Titanic was discovered on September 1, 1985, by a joint French-American expedition led by American oceanographer Robert Ballard and French oceanographer Jean-Louis Michel. Here's how they found it: * Decades of unsuccessful attempts: For over 70 years after its sinking in 1912, numeRead more
The wreck of the Titanic was discovered on September 1, 1985, by a joint French-American expedition led by American oceanographer Robert Ballard and French oceanographer Jean-Louis Michel.
See lessHere’s how they found it:
* Decades of unsuccessful attempts: For over 70 years after its sinking in 1912, numerous attempts to locate the Titanic failed due to technical limitations and the vastness of the North Atlantic.
* A secret mission: Robert Ballard, working for the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, secured funding from the U.S. Navy for his deep-sea technology. However, the Navy’s primary interest was actually for Ballard to find two lost nuclear submarines, the USS Thresher and USS Scorpion, which had sunk in the 1960s. The search for the Titanic was a secondary objective, and the overall mission was kept secret.
* The key: debris trails: Ballard and his team learned from their search for the submarines that imploded vessels leave a large trail of debris on the ocean floor. They applied this knowledge to the Titanic search, reasoning that it would also have left a debris field.
* Advanced technology: The expedition utilized an experimental, unmanned submersible called the Argo, developed by the U.S. Navy. The Argo was equipped with sonar and cameras and was towed just above the ocean floor, sending photographs and video back to the research vessel Knorr.
* The breakthrough: In the early morning hours of September 1, 1985, the Argo began to pick up signs of debris on the ocean floor. Soon after, one of the Titanic’s massive boilers was sighted at a depth of about 13,000 feet (approximately 4,000 meters) in the North Atlantic, about 400 miles east of Newfoundland.
* Discovery of the main wreck: The next day, the main body of the ship was discovered nearby. It was found to have split into two main sections (the bow and the stern), with hundreds of thousands of artifacts scattered in a two-square-mile radius around the ship.
Ballard’s discovery was a monumental achievement, not only for finding the legendary ship but also for proving the effectiveness of his new deep-sea exploration technology.