September 1, 1985: Wreck of RMS Titanic Found!

A Brief History

On September 1, 1985, after 73 years sleeping on the deep dark ocean floor, the wreck of the fabled ocean liner, RMS Titanic, was discovered by a joint American-French salvage team led by Robert Ballard, sponsored by the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution.  The mighty ship had sunk on its maiden voyage when it hit an iceberg 375 miles South of Newfoundland on April 15, 1912 with the loss of more than 1500 passengers and crew, including the ship’s captain.  Not equipped with sufficient lifeboats for all on board, only about a third (705) of the 2224 people aboard survived to be rescued by the RMS Carpathia.

Digging Deeper

The Titanic was the largest ship afloat when she sailed on her only voyage, and had modern safety features such as watertight compartments and a radio (Morse code only). Sinking in only 2 hours and 40 minutes, not all lifeboats were filled and not all could be launched properly due to the listing ship.  Despite survivors’ accounts describing the way the ship settled implying it had partially or totally split in half, for decades after the sinking it was assumed the big ship went down intact.

Lying in 2 main pieces 12,415 feet below sea level, the wreck was found over 13 miles from the (apparently) incorrect location that had been given by Titanic’s radio operators, contributing to the difficulty in finding the wreck.  Additionally, the 2 main pieces of the ship rest over a third of a mile apart, indicating she broke up on or quite near the surface.  The debris field covers an enormous 5 by 3 miles of seabed.  Efforts to locate the wreck were hampered by the depth, rough water, assumptions that the ship was in one piece, and limitations of the sonar used to search (mostly the wrong) area.  The Ballard team used an innovative towed unmanned submersible called Argo equipped with cameras to find Titanic. The incredible pressure at that depth of 6500 pounds per square inch makes manned exploration highly problematic, although subsequent manned trips to view the site have been made since.

Prior to the discovery and mapping of the wreck, popular speculation about attempts to raise the ship had been made in various media.  The speed (20 knots or so) with which the wreck hit the bottom created far too much damage for any thoughts of raising the ruined halves of the ship.  Since discovery of the wreck, many other expeditions have visited the site, some of those removing artifacts for sale and display, a hotly debated practice.  In fact, in 2012 for the 100th anniversary of the sinking, the wreck site was made a Unesco World Heritage Site and plans to repaint the ship (underwater!) to stop the rust and metal eating bacteria that is destroying the wreck were made.  As with many other major wrecks, lawsuits have abounded about who has what rights to the site and relics.  Many of the retrieved relics have been displayed in museums and in traveling exhibits seen by more than 20 million people.

On January 6, 2009, the last surviving passenger of the Titanic, Millvina Dean, died in England at the age of 98.  She was too young at the time of the tragedy to remember any of the events.

The public retains a tremendous hunger for all things Titanic, with numerous cultural references in books, movies, plays, and television.  Something about the “unsinkable ship” that sank anyway just will not die.

Question for students (and subscribers) to ponder: What is your favorite film or documentary about the Titanic?

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Historical Evidence

For more information, please see…

Ballard, Robert D. and Ken Marschall.  Discovery Of The Titanic (Exploring The Greatest Of All Lost Ships).  Warner/Madison Press, 1988.

Ballard, Robert D., Patrick Crean, et al.  Exploring the Titanic: How the Greatest Ship Ever Lost was Found.  Madison Press Books, 2014.

The featured image in this article, a biew of the bow of the RMS Titanic photographed in June 2004 by the ROV Hercules during an expedition returning to the shipwreck of the Titanic, is in the public domain because it contains materials that originally came from the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, taken or made as part of an employee’s official duties.

You can also watch a video version of this article on YouTube: