However, before anyone could even decide what to do with the Titanic, they had to find it first. Over the years, there have been countless colorful schemes to raise the ship from the murky depths. One involved pumping liquid nitrogen into a special net and make the package float to the surface like an iceberg, while others suggested using electromagnets or nylon balloons to do the same job. Until 1985, nobody succeeded in discovering the lost ship since it wasn't showing up on any sonar equipment.
That's when one undersea explorer got a winning idea.
COMMENT and tell us what you think should be done with the Titanic.
Dr. Robert Ballard led the team that finally found the Titanic.
Since nobody could find the ship on sonar, he proposed using a live feed from 20,000 feet below the surface to catch a glimpse of the shipwreck. To capture this footage, he would use an unmanned camera sled called Argo.
He still had to fund this sled, so he sought out help from the Navy.
They weren't too excited about footing the bill for his Titanic search, but they had other plans for his Argo idea.
Namely, they wanted to use it to find two lost nuclear submarines.
Eventually, the Naval leaders struck a deal with Ballard. If he could find and map the subs, they'd let him use the time he had left over to search for the Titanic.
This only left Ballard 12 days to find the famous ship, so he needed backup.
So he teamed up with a French research institute, who searched while he was off finding the submarines. The French ship used a "mowing the lawn" technique to float up and down the suspected wreck site in the hope that their sonar would find it.
Unfortunately, this didn't yield results.
Unfortunately, this didn't yield results.
But Ballard had learned a new technique when he found the subs.
He noticed the current carried small pieces of debris from the wrecks, leaving a kind of "bread crumb" trail back to them. If the Titanic left a similar trail, Argo could pick it up, and Ballard's team could follow it to the shipwreck.
After several days of non-stop looking, they found one of the Titanic's boilers.
They were ready to break out the champagne but noticed it was 2:20 a.m., which was the exact time the Titanic finally went down.
“We were embarrassed we were celebrating,” Ballard later said, “and all of a sudden we realized that we should not be dancing on someone’s grave.”
“We were embarrassed we were celebrating,” Ballard later said, “and all of a sudden we realized that we should not be dancing on someone’s grave.”
When they followed the trail, they came across the Titanic's bow.
With only a few days left before a storm rolled in, the team scrambled to take all the photos they could of the ship's hull, crow's nest and even inside where the Grand Staircase had once stood.
Ballard has since returned to the site and explored the ship's insides up close with a small submersible.
Today, he is a strong opponent of salvaging the Titanic and says there's no better resting place than the quiet, peaceful slope it now sits on.
0 comments: