1912 ATLANTIC OCEAN
In 1912 the largest, most luxurious
cruise ship of its day sank. Its discovery
after decades of searching revealed
stunning details of the tragedy.
completed the submarine inspec-
tion, if there was time, he could
do what he wanted. He was finally
able to begin looking for the Titanic
with less than two weeks to spare.
And then, suddenly one night at
1:05 a.m., video cameras picked up
one of the ship’s boilers. “I cannot
believe my eyes,” he wrote about
the moment of discovery.
In the years since Ballard’s
expedition, organic processes
have been relentlessly breaking
down the Titanic: Mollusks have
gobbled up much of the ship’s
wood, while microbes eat away at
exposed metal, forming icicle-like
“rusticles.” The hull has started to
collapse, taking staterooms with it.
“The most shocking area of deterio-
ration was the starboard side of the
officers’ quarters, where the cap-
tain’s quarters were,” said Titanic
historian Parks Stephenson after a
manned submersible dive in 2019.
Using state-of-the-art equipment,
the dive team captured images of
the wreck that can be used to createAT 2:20 A.M. ON APRIL 15, 1912, THE “UNSINKABLE” R.M.S.
Titanic disappeared beneath the waves, taking with her
some 1,500 souls. Why does this tragedy exert such a mag-
netic pull on our imagination more than a century later? The
sheer extravagance of the Titanic’s demise lies at the heart of
its attraction. This has always been a story of superlatives: A
ship so strong and so grand, sinking in water so cold and so
deep. The ship’s fate was sealed on its maiden voyage from
Southampton, England, to New York City. At 11:40 p.m. it
sideswiped an iceberg in the North Atlantic, buckling por-
tions of the starboard hull along a 300-foot span and exposing
the six forward compartments to the ocean’s waters. From
this moment onward, sinking was a certainty.
Over decades, several expeditions sought to find the Titanic
without success—a problem compounded by the North Atlan-
tic’s unpredictable weather, the enormous depth (12,500 feet)
at which the sunken ship lies, and conflicting accounts of its
final moments. At last, 73 years after it sank, the final rest-
ing place of the Titanic was located by National Geographic
Explorer at Large Robert Ballard and French scientist Jean-
Louis Michel on September 1, 1985. The Titanic lay roughly
380 miles southeast of Newfoundland in international waters.
Recently declassified information has revealed that the
discovery stemmed from a secret U.S. Navy investigation of
two wrecked nuclear submarines, the U.S.S. Thresher and
U.S.S. Scorpion. The military wanted to know the fate of the
nuclear reactors that powered the ships, and to see if there
was any evidence to support the theory that the Scorpion had
been sunk by the Soviets. (There wasn’t.)
Ballard had met with the Navy in 1982 to request funding
to develop the robotic submersible technology he needed
to find the Titanic. The military was interested, but for
the purpose of gathering its own intel. Once Ballard had
Items recovered from
the disaster include
this pocket watch.
MARK THIESSEN