when was the wreck of the titanic found
Wreck of the RMS Titanic Titanic sank in 1912, when she collided with an iceberg during her maiden voyage. The wreck could not be located at the time and was not discovered until 1985. Numerous expeditions tried using sonar to map the sea bed in the hope of spotting it, but were unsuccessful. The wreck was finally located by a joint French-American expedition led by Jean-Louis Michel of IFREMER and Robert Ballard of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. The wreck has been the focus of intense interest since its discovery and has been visited by numerous expeditions, including salvage operations which have controversially recovered thousands of items which have been conserved and put on public display.
Wreck of the RMS Titanic Ballard realized that looking for the wreck itself using sonar was unlikely to be successful and adopted a different tactic, drawing on the experience of the surveys of Thresher and Scorpion; he would look for the debris field instead,[33] using Argo's cameras rather than sonar. Whereas sonar could not distinguish man-made debris on the sea bed from natural objects, cameras could. The debris field would also be a far bigger target, stretching a mile (1.6 km) or longer, whereas Titanic itself was only 90 feet (27 m) wide.[34] The search required round-the-clock towing of Argo back and forth above the sea bed, with shifts of watchers aboard the research vessel Knorr looking at the camera pictures for any sign of debris.[35] After a week of fruitless searching, at 12.48 am on Sunday 1 September 1985 pieces of debris began to appear on Knorr's screens. One of them was identified as a boiler, identical to those shown in pictures from 1911.[36] The following day, the main part of the wreck was found and Argo sent back the first pictures of Titanic since her sinking 73 years before.[37] The discovery made headlines around the world.[38]