Finding and diving the Titanic

Robert Ballard · 1985 CE – 1986 CE · Earth

Search 150 square nautical miles of abyssal plain for a wreck that four expeditions had failed to find.

Historical context

Four expeditions had swept the sea floor south of Newfoundland looking for a hull, and found nothing. Ballard's insight, learned from surveying two imploded nuclear submarines for the Navy, was that a sinking ship leaves a long trail of light debris that the current spreads like a windsock. Argo found the trail on 1 September 1985, and followed it to a boiler.

The voyage, step by step

1. Knorr sails from the Azores

   August 1985

   In August 1985 the Woods Hole ship leaves Ponta Delgada with twelve days of ship time left and a robot sled called Argo in her hold.

2. Mowing the lawn

   1985 CE

   For ten days the ship drags Argo back and forth over a search box the French had already swept with sonar, reading grey mud on a video wall.

3. A boiler on the screen

   1 September 1985

   In the small hours of 1 September 1985 the smooth bottom breaks into pockmarks, then debris, then the unmistakable riveted drum of a ship's boiler.

4. Twenty past two

   1985 CE

   The celebration on deck stops when someone realises the hour: it is approaching 2:20 in the morning, the minute the ship went under in 1912.

5. Back with Alvin

   July 1986

   In July 1986 Atlantis II sails from Woods Hole carrying the submersible Alvin and a new robot the size of a lawnmower.

6. On the deck of the Titanic

   1986 CE

   Alvin lands on the boat deck beside the empty davits, in water two degrees above freezing and utterly black.

7. Jason Junior goes inside

   1986 CE

   The small robot leaves its garage, drops down the first-class stairwell and lights a chandelier still hanging in its place.

8. A plaque and nothing taken

   1986 CE

   The team leaves a memorial plaque on the stern and comes home with eleven dives of film and not a single object from the wreck.

Outcome

The Titanic located on 1 September 1985 and visited by Alvin and Jason Junior the following July, without an object being removed.

Robert Ballard

Marine geologist who built towed camera robots and used them to find the Titanic in 1985 and to change how the deep sea is searched.

Read on Wikipedia

Sources

• Robert Ballard — Wikipedia
• The Discovery of the TitanicRobert D. Ballard · Warner/Madison Press · 1987
• Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution: Alvin dive records and ship logsWoods Hole Oceanographic Institution

Continue exploring

• The 1987 Titanic recovery divesNautile · 1987 CE
• The search for the BismarckArgo and Jason (Ballard's Bismarck search) · 1989 CE
• The JIM walk off OahuSylvia Earle · 1979 CE
• The Galápagos Rift hydrothermal expeditionJack Corliss and the Alvin team · 1977 CE