How They Really Discovered The Wreckage Of The Titanic

the tragic fate of the Titanic instantly captured the public imagination in 1912 but the wreck wasn't discovered until decades after it sank so who actually found it and how the RMS Titanic struck an iceberg in the North Atlantic around 11 30 pm on April 14 1912. the evacuation process was slow and poorly organized meaning that many were left behind when the ship finally sank around 2

20 am on April 15th over 1500 people died that night out of an estimated 2 240 people on board given all of the eyewitnesses as well as the eventual presence of rescue ships you'd think that it would be easy for investigators to find the wreckage but it wasn't quite so simple the Titanic kept drifting after transmitting its last known location leaving investigators with a large search

area that covered hundreds of miles finding a single ocean liner on the sea floor about 12 600 feet below the surface is no easy task and anyone trying to recover the Titanic would have to put in some serious time effort and willpower to find her almost immediately after the Titanic sank it seemed as if people were prepared to pull the wreck out of the Atlantic This

Strange Obsession didn't really dissipate as the decades wore on either many wanted to figure out where the ship was and once it had been located raise it from the seabed but some of those proposals were notably odd one British company suggested filling the ship with Vaseline contained in bags allowing the hardened petroleum jelly to float the wreck to the surface others thought modified ping pong balls

might work in the more immediate aftermath of the disaster Denver architect Charles Smith came up with an idea that involved using a submarine and a bunch of magnets others seemed interested in balloon-based ideas while some suggested using liquid nitrogen however given that no one had even found the wreck yet these ideas remained highly theoretical the Titanic went undiscovered for many decades after its sinking ultimately professor

and oceanographer Bob Ballard was the one who along with his team finally located the wreck in 1985 but he didn't find it on his first go in fact Ballard had already attempted to find the wreck in the 70s and came up with nothing still if anyone was going to find the Titanic it would likely have been someone like Ballard I boldly go where no one has

gone before on planet Earth you can't have a better job than that but the 1980s he was already a respected scientist and Explorer he had served in the Navy before taking on a job with the Woods Hole oceanographic research institution as if that weren't enough he also earned two doctorates in Marine geology and geophysics and designed to submersible the Alvin which was made to take humans

far beneath the surface of the Ocean prior to his legendary Discovery Ballard had already taken part in a number of scientific Expeditions one for example uncovered deep sea vents improved that life in the Deep could survive without sunlight yet he was always focused on finding the Titanic often likening the Rex Discovery to his own personal Mount Everest the harsh reality of many scientific Expeditions is a

need for money sure explorers and researchers have plenty of passion education and dedication to go around but it's often all for not if their wallets are empty after all a ship needs fuel a crew equipment and any manner of other supplies ready before it can even report but for Bob Ballard his 1985 trip to find the Titanic at a somewhat surprising and secretive Thunder blame it

on the Cold War Ballard had initially been approached by the US military to find the wrecks of two submarines Scorpion and the thresher which also happen to be located in the North Atlantic during the Expedition Ballard was technically placed back on duty as a Navy officer though of course he wasn't able to disclose that at the time guess what's in the middle the Titanic the only

reason I found it was because of that fact that there was flanked by two nuclear submarines after finding the two nuclear vessels he was essentially free to search for the Titanic although he was only left with 12 days to do so his eventual discovery of the Titanic even provided convenient cover for the mission during the tense period between U.S and Soviet relations nobody could have found

a single shipwreck in The Frigid Waters of the North Atlantic without some assistance from technology the group began its search with sonar a system built by Jean-Louis Michelle of the French National Institute of oceanography was deployed to mow the lawn meaning that the ship was tasked with making its way across the search area and regular strips Towing side scan sonar equipment in order to get a

glimpse of the ocean floor after 31 days they still hadn't found the Titanic but had managed to eliminate a whopping 75 percent to the search area Ballard's team then deployed an unmanned submersible with a camera known as the Argo the group's Theory relied on eyewitness accounts from the night of the sinking which claimed the ship had broken in half as it went under if the Titanic

had indeed broken into two pieces it would have left a considerable swath of bits and pieces scattered across the sea floor Ballard believed that searching for the debris field would prove easier than searching for the ship itself and it worked after days of searching Ballard's team found one of the Titanic's distinctive boilers lying on the seabed the crew initially celebrated this momentous fine but then paused

came across the bow of the long-lost Titanic eyewitness reports suggested that the Titanic had split in two during the sinking but this wasn't necessarily a consensus opinion a minority of survivors including officers of the Titanic's White Star Line claimed that the ship had sunk intact however it's possible that they were biased since it wouldn't do the White Star Line much good to suggest that any of

their other ships could have broken in half too many more testimonies failed to specify exactly in what shape the Titanic had been when it finally sank beneath the water Frank Prentiss One Survivor remembered and all of a sudden she lifted up quickly and you could hear everything crashing through a everything that was movable was going through her given the confusing evacuation The Dark Knight on which

it had sunk and the trauma felt by survivors of the disaster it's no wonder that the details became confused the two-piece theory was finally proven by Ballard's team as the bow and Stern were clearly separated by over one thousand feet but how did such a large ship break into two pieces that night in 1912. well it's all about physics as the bow took on water the

stern began to lift putting pressure on the ship the pressure on the ship's riveted hole sections eventually caused the liner to break apart into two large sections unsurprisingly the Titanic wasn't in fantastic shape when Ballard found it the ship had after all split into two pieces and Scattered debris across the seabed what's more had been sitting there for decades accumulating mud and rust nevertheless the wreck

was still undeniably the Titanic Ballard's team was even able to identify features such as the location of the ship's famed grand staircase since the ship's rediscovery multiple Expeditions have been sent out to the location of the wreckage as the years have gone on the deterioration of the sunken liner has continued to Pace the environment has not been kind to the ship leading to buckling roofs and

the collapse of the famous Crow's Nest or Lookout Frederick Fleet first saw the iceberg that took down the ship in 2019 the first man dived to the Titanic in 14 years found even more damage with the famous Captain's bathtub having already fallen through steadily weakening floors what's more bacteria that consume iron have produced rusticles which though now a visual Hallmark of the wreck are still striking

evidence of the Titanic's steady deterioration little can really be done to Halt the Decay though efforts to scan the rack will hopefully produce 3D models that can remain long after the Titanic disappears forever though some prefer to call it Salvage Bob Ballard has stronger words for the idea that people might snatch up bits and pieces of the Titanic looting given that the wreck is the final

resting place of an estimated 1500 people many have also concluded that Salvage operations amounts a little more than grave robbing Ballard has certainly spoken of the sights with the sort of reverence reserved for grave sites one saying it is a quiet and peaceful place and a Fitting Place for the remains of this greatest of sea tragedies to rest forever may it remain that way and we're

just now beginning to discover the pyramids of the deep and and I just hope that we go through that door of technology to appreciate and not to plunder Ballard says that he certainly understands the fascination that so many people have with the Titanic the dream of finding and documenting the wreck is one that's been following him since he was young after all but in his words

it's being loved to death by visitors more than Mother Nature is attacking it it's true that salvagers have been slowly picking apart the wreck some have obtained legitimate licenses to do so While others have worked illegally and it's very possible that while some artifacts may have fallen deeper into the wreck as the ship deterior rates other pieces of the Titanic's history have been plucked up by

those salvagers meaning they're now sitting in somebody's Private Collection those who are especially worried about the prospect of people picking over the Titanic's remains will be glad to know that the ship now enjoys some measure of protection in early 2020 the United States and the United Kingdom reached a joint agreement on managing the site to the sunken ocean liner technically a treaty had been agreed upon

in 2003 but it was never officially ratified after Canada and France appeared to give it a cold shoulder the U.S was dragging its feet as well but changed its mind in late 2019 pre-existing UNESCO status established some rules while the new treaty is set to expand upon some of the basic guidelines set out in 2012 by the United Nations however enforcing these treaties and rules gets

a little tricky when you're out in the open ocean and given how the Titanic can be vulnerable to even legitimate visitors and the forces of time in nature remains to be seen just how effective that protected status may be what do you do after you accomplish one of your greatest dreams you accomplish more indeed Bob Ballard never stopped exploring though he acknowledges that he'll probably always

be remembered as one of the co-discoverers of the Titanic wreck he believes that that is no excuse to rest on one's Laurels not that having such a reputation is necessarily A Bad Thing of course as Ballard once told CNN in many ways it has sort of freed me up to dream other dreams so I feel emancipated in many ways in the years since his achievements Ballard

estimates that he's found about a hundred shipwrecks in total in 2019 he even put in one of the more extensive efforts to find evidence of Amelia Earhart's fate Earhart's a renowned Aviator disappeared during a round-the-world flight attempt in 1937. some believe that she may have survived a plane crash and made it to niku mororo atoll Ballard and his team weren't able to find evidence of her

playing around the but it was an Illuminating Expedition nonetheless using Advanced sonar technology to scour the nearby ocean floor and as Ballard reminded everyone on his team it's worth remembering that he had missed the Titanic by a mere 500 feet in one of his earliest expeditions thank you [Music]