The Wreck Of The Titanic: How Many People Have Actually Seen It?

The wreck of the Titanic is so dangerous that it's even claiming lives today but how many people have risked it all to visit the ship's watery grave? When the Titanic set off on its maiden voyage in 1912, no one on board could have imagined the legacy the ship would leave behind. The Titanic struck an iceberg off the coast of Newfoundland and sank on April 15th, 1912.

1,503 people lost their lives; only 706 survived. The breakdown of deaths among class, gender, and crew type is both telling and disturbing. Sixty-one percent of first-class passengers survived, while 25% of third-class passengers survived. Twenty percent of male passengers survived, while 75% of female passengers survived. Those who did make it, of course, were left thoroughly traumatized by the sinking. "I shall probably dream about it tonight, have

another nightmare. You'd think I'm too old for that, but you'd be amazed." All in all, given the scope and drama behind the event, it's no wonder that the sinking of the Titanic continues to capture the imagination. For a long time, the nature of the Titanic's sinking remained something of a mystery. The ship's wreckage wasn't even discovered until 1985, 73 years after it sank, as part of

a secret U.S. Navy mission. Since then, explorers, researchers, the curious, and the wealthy have ventured out to the Titanic to try and learn more. In 2023, a company called Magellan Ltd. rendered the whole wreckage in a 16-terabyte 3D model. That mission deployed two submersibles with manned crews. Those individuals join the roster of fewer than 250 total people who have visited the wreckage. The first person to

visit the Titanic after it sank was Robert Ballard, an oceanographer at the University of Rhode Island and National Geographic Society explorer-in-residence. In the 1980s, Ballard approached the U.S. Navy with a proposal to build a robotic submersible capable of embarking on the mission to discover the Titanic. The Navy was interested in the technology involved in the venture and agreed, and, in 1985, Ballard got lucky on his

voyage. By following a trail of heaviest-to-lightest debris broken off from the Titanic as it was sinking, he was able to trace a path to the wreckage. He got the coordinates of the ship at a staggering 13,000 feet deep and 400 nautical miles off the coast of Newfoundland. In the years since, others have followed in his wake. Most visitors to the wreck have been either researchers or

those connected with expedition companies. And they don't go often; EYOS Expeditions visited the Titanic in 2019, a full 14 years after the last time anyone had visited. Previous to that, in 2000, reporter and physicist Michael Guillen visited the craft, took some notable pictures, and barely made it out alive after a collision with one of the Titanic's propellers. And then, of course, there's James Cameron, whose 1997

film Titanic permanently cemented the tragedy of the ship's sinking in public imagination. Cameron's all-consuming preoccupation with the Titanic led him to dive down to the wreckage a grand total of 33 times. On June 17th, 2023, a submersible from OceanGate Expeditions spearheaded a particularly infamous journey down to the sunken Titanic. The submersible Titan vanished on Sunday, June 18th; in the aftermath of the disaster, it became clear

that this Titanic expedition was unlike most of the others. In an interview for the marine tech company Teledyne Marine, OceanGate founder Stockton Rush said that he didn't hire older, more experienced men to work at the company because they weren't, in his words, "inspirational." By contrast, he glibly said of the Titan submersible that "anybody can drive" it, with the help of its now-infamous video game controller. Rush

was piloting the vessel at the time of its destruction. The other four passengers included a Pakistani father and his 19-year-old son, a British businessman and adventurer, and a French Titanic expert. OceanGate's doomed mission was one of a string of Titanic tourism expeditions they had set up each person on board the Titan paid $250,000 for the journey. Mike Reiss, who took part in last year's underwater tour

of the Titanic, told CNN that he knew he was risking his life by diving down 13,000 feet below the waves.