![]() ![]() The chief purpose of the revisit was to test a new, remote-controlled video camera called Jason Jr. Inside their small submarine, the Alvin, Ballard and two crew members roamed over and around the wreck for a total of 33 hours in 11 dives.Īfter a 2 1/2-hour drop to the Titanic, the Alvin could explore for three hours before the 2 1/2-hour return trip to the mother ship on the surface. The site, near the edge of the continental shelf, is about 400 miles southeast of Newfoundland.Īlthough last year's exploration produced hundreds of detailed photographs showing clearly identifiable parts of the Titanic and even wine bottles and silver plates scattered on the floor of the Atlantic, Ballard and his crew returned to the wreck this month for a personal exploration. That expedition established that the Titanic had broken into two main pieces, both of which rest virtually upright on a nearly featureless muddy bottom 2 1/2 miles below the surface. The Woods Hole team found the wreck last September and photographed it from an unmanned platform lowered from a research ship. on April 14, 1912, and the time the Titanic went under 2 1/2 hours later, 705 people escaped in lifeboats. It was because of these reports that analysts concluded the ship had suffered not so much a crushing blow as a slicing by a sharp wedge of ice.īallard speculated that the ship simply ground against the massive iceberg.īetween the time the accident occurred, at 11:40 p.m. He said, however, that he felt confident in ruling out the gash theory because he was able to examine most of the area where the gash was supposed to be and because rescued passengers reported feeling no sudden collision. The amount of separation would have caused more than enough leakage to sink the supposedly unsinkable ship, he said.īallard said, however, that it was impossible to see the foremost part of the lower hull because it is buried 50 feet in mud. "It appears the damage was really separating the plates," Ballard said. Ballard of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution said yesterday at a news conference here.īallard, who examined most of the 882-foot Titanic's hull from the small research submarine, said that many of the steel plates in the region of the hull where the gash was supposed to be - the forward end of the starboard side - had buckled, popped their rivets and separated from adjacent plates. "We saw absolutely no evidence of a gash," expedition leader Robert D. The luxury liner RMS Titanic, which the history books say sank in 1912 after a collision with an iceberg tore a 300-foot gash in its side, showed no such gash to explorers who recently completed 11 days of diving in a small submarine to examine the rusty wreck. ![]()
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