Forty years ago, in the early morning of September 1, granular black and white images of metal cylinders appeared in video feed at the Knorr Command Center, a research vessel that is studying the Atlantic Ocean bottom, searching for the world's most famous shipwreck: the Titanic.
Members of the four-person watch team suspected that the object might be a sunken boiler that could not tear itself off the screen, so they sent the team's chef to Rouse Bob Ballard, the expedition's chief scientist, who has been searching for the shipwreck since the 1970s. He woke up and read in the bed in the cottage.
The chef “didn't even finish his sentence. I jumped out. I actually put my flight suit on my pajamas and I didn't take off for a few days after that,” recalls Ballard, a senior scientist in applied marine physics and engineering at the Woods Hall Oceanography Institute in Massachusetts.
CNN talks to Ballard, whose team member Dana Yoerger is a senior scientist in marine robotics before the 40th anniversary of the discovery of Titanic. They tell the story of unusual events that lead to seeing amazing events and how adventures go beyond that.
“When I came in, we had a picture of the boiler on the wall and we looked at it,” Ballard said. “We realized that it must be (from) the Titanic and all the bed lines became loose.”
Even 73 years after the iconic ship set sail in 1912, Ballard and his team discovered the wreckage, the Titanic was the source of constant fascination. The “incredible” ship's virgin sailing in the Gilded Age with America's richest ships is a story of human stupidity, class prejudice and technological failure.
Watch the wreckage of the Titanic discovered by the crew
Watch the wreckage of the Titanic discovered by the crew
1:30
Its discovery in 1985 only exacerbated the Titanic's attraction to the public imagination. It unleashed a 1997 blockbuster film that remains one of the highest documentary and museum exhibitions in film history, and for those with deep pockets, high-risk travel, there can be seen below the ocean surface about 13,000 feet (3,900 meters) below its final resting location, one of which is 2023, creating a fresh popularity.
For marine explorers such as Ballard and his colleagues, discovering the Titanic was like the first time climbing Mount Everest. Since then, prototype technology has changed deep-sea exploration and science, thus greatly expanding scientists’ understanding of the ocean. But even with the right tools, revealing an inspiring turn of the iconic shipwreck.
The search for the Titanic in 1985 was not Ballard's first attempt to find the wreckage. An expedition failed when a 3,000-foot drill pipe was broken by a broken 3,000-foot drilling hole, according to Ballard’s 2021 memoir, “Deep”. This experience, and the need for real-time images, convinced Ballard to remotely operated underwater vehicles to play video back into the exploration vessel, a better way forward, but he worked hard to find funding for his vision.
Ultimately, the U.S. Navy supported the development of Ballard technology, a deep-sea imaging system nicknamed Argo. The Navy is interested in using it to determine why the two nuclear submarines (USS Thresher and the Scorpion) sank in the Atlantic Ocean in the 1960s, and the wider Cold War intelligence gathering purpose.
Ballard convinced naval officials to build the Titanic during the expedition for a period of time to investigate the submarine, a cover story that ultimately acted as a secret naval mission.
“People didn't know at the time, at least a lot of people, it was the Titanic (search) that was covered up a secret military operation I did as a naval intelligence officer,” Ballard said. “We don't want the Soviet Union to know where the submarine is.”
Despite years of planning, Ballard is not optimistic, and he will find the Titanic for two reasons: the search time is short, and the French team is led by Jean-Louis Michel, an engineer at the French Oceanography agency, who has been working with, and is using the new, sophisticated ship-mounted Sonar System to locate the ship's end point.
“The agreement is that the French will find it, and once they find it, I have enough time, a week is enough to shoot it,” Ballard said.
Although the French team missed the wreck at close range, as he described, Ballard's “camera on the string” discovered the wreck, with the help of a large narrow search area after French sonar scan.
Ballard possesses what he calls the “light moment” while drawing fragments of the Scorpion submarine that is crucial to the success of the mission. Its debris field is a mile-long small diameter, rather than the expected circular area. Heavier objects are directly immersed in the seabed, but lighter debris falls at slower speeds, and the currents make them further away.
He realized that the Titanic was similar to that of the Scorpion Us, which would have a similar debris field (if not larger), and finding such debris flow was easier than finding the hull and other heavy loads of the container.
“It's the technology and the knowledge of how to use it,” Yoerger said. But “the biggest thing that led to our success was Ballard's strategy. He wasn't trying to find the ship, he was trying to find the debris field, which is a bigger goal, and it's a particularly suitable one to look with your eyeball.”
Argo filmed a black and white video of the Titanic in 1985, while an older system called Angus, with a 35mm camera system, was captured The blue still image reveals the existence of the wreckage. A year later, the team returned with more advanced color cameras to record every inch of the wreckage, including the boat’s swimming pool, large staircase and bows, producing iconic images that are still familiar today.
Ballard also became the man who visited the wreckage through Alvin, a crew member he had previously driven, which took more than two hours to reach the bottom of the sea. Upon arriving there, he discovers poignant artifacts, including children’s dolls, undecorated champagne bottles and silverware. He did not see the remains of human beings.
Rusty traces covered the Titanic, created by bacteria, feasted on metal, creating long red spikes – a phenomenon called “rusticles”, which later entered the Oxford English Dictionary.
Ballard recalls that some areas of the ship were built were covered with protective pink paint and looked primitive. Ballard said to preserve “very sacred ground,” he advocated a similar approach, possibly a protective coating used by underwater robots, to prevent further erosion of the wreckage.
The last resting place of the Titanic is far from the only discovery of Ballard in a long and outstanding career among scientists and explorers. An expedition to the Mid-Atlantic Ridge provides key evidence for plate tectonics, while sailing along the seabed along the Galapagos Rift reveals the existence of hydrothermal ventilation holes and the existence of wonderful life forms that live above – suggesting that life can flourish without sunlight and prompt its origins from its origins.
Ballard went on to discover several other huge wreckages: the bismark of the Nazi warship, the New Yorktown aircraft carrier and the PT-109, a naval ship commanded by President John Kennedy in the mid-20s during World War II.
But his golden touch faltered in 2019, when an expedition to find Amelia Earhart’s down plane was empty. Explorer said he believes the plane can be found with the help of new technology. “It's still on our checkbox,” he said.
Although human-run divers can still play a role, he said the future of ocean exploration is far away and robotic, and he eventually envisioned that untugboat ships would make the world's oceans develop. To date, about 27% of the seabed has been mapped.
“We can now reach vehicles that can launch multiple AUVs, autonomous (underwater) vehicles, and this is a pack of dogs you can send out. … We can put all of these assets in the water at the same time.
“I mean, it's all about bottom time. The real calculation you do is how long you're underwater.”
Yoerger turned his attention to the seabed and is developing an underwater robot that can explore the Twilight Zone – a middle ocean of 200 to 1,000 meters (about 650 to 3,300 feet) outside the sea, beyond the range of sunlight, which is within reach and plays a key role in regulating the global climate, by mitigating the fuel fuel of carbon oxides in regulating the global climate.
At the age of 83, Ballard was still actively exploring the ocean. In July, he returned to Guadalcanal, the Pacific Solomon Islands, from a 21-day expedition on his nonprofit, the Marine Exploration Trust. There, he began drawing ship and aircraft losses in the five-World Naval battles between August and December 1942.
“I love it when the kids tell me to stop finding things, so there’s something to find,” Ballard said.
But he said he remains confident in the ocean of the next generation of explorers.
Register for CNN's Miracle Theory Science Communication. Explore the news of the universe, about fascinating discoveries, scientific advancements, and more.