The man who found the Titanic is still searching for shipwrecks four decades later

Forty years ago, in the early hours of September 1, the black and white images of a metal cylinder, in the video broadcasts of Knorr’s command center, the world’s most famous showcase debris: A research ship looking for the Atlantic Sea Base for Titanic emerged.

The members of the four -person clock team, who suspected that the object could be a wrecking ship, could not remove them from the things that emerged on the screen, so they sent the team’s cook to Bob Ballard, the scientist who has been looking for Breek since the 1970s. He was awake, he was studying in the cabin bunk bed.

Cook “I didn’t even finish the sentence. I jumped. I put my flight set on my pajamas a few days later,” Massachusetts remembered the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute in Woods Hole Ocean Physics and Engineering Senior Scientist Emeritus.

CNN spoke to Ballard and spoke to Dana Yoerger, a Woods Hole, a senior scientist in the sea robotics before the 40th anniversary of Titanic’s discovery. They told about this striking view and the unusual chain of events that led to how the adventure didn’t stand here.

Ballard said, “As we entered, there was a picture of the accident on the wall and we looked.” “We certainly realized that it was from Titanic, and all the bed was loosened.”

Ballard and his team were a source of admiration that did not stop, even before the iconic ship sailed in 1912, before finding the debris. “Indispensable” ship With the American’s richest, human craze, class prejudice and technological failure story, he appeared on a gilded age.

The discovery in 1985 only intensified the withdrawal of Titanic to the public imagination; One of the highest revenues in the history of the film, various documentaries and museum exhibitions and the last resting place under the ocean surface approximately 13,000 feet (3,900 meters) to see the high -betting trips to see a 1997 box office records released. One of them resulted in a new tragedy in 2023.

Finding Titanic for ocean explorers such as Ballard and his colleagues was like climbing Mount Everest for the first time. The prototype technology, which made it possible, has transformed deep sea discovery and science since then, and greatly expanded the knowledge of scientists about the ocean. However, even with the right tools, it took an inspiring change in the strategy to reveal the iconic ship debris.

Search hidden a very hidden task

1985 The search for Titanic was not Ballard’s attempt to find wreckage. According to Ballard’s memories of 2021, a 3,000 -meter drilling pipe, where Sonar and cameras were added, failed the 1977 expedition. With the need for live images, experience convinced that underwater vehicles that could return to Ballard search vessel were a better way, but struggled to find funds for his vision.

As a result, the US navy supported the development of the technology of Ballard, the deep sea imaging system. Slang. Navy, why two nuclear submarines, USS THRESHER And USS ScorpionIn the 1960s, the Atlantic and the wider Cold War had sank for the intelligence collection purposes.

Ballard convinced the navy officials to build a period of time to search for Titanic during the discovery to examine the submarines, a Ploy, who finally served as a cover story for the hidden mission of the Navy.

Ballard said, “What people didn’t know at that time, at least many people, the Titanic (search) was covered by a very secret military operation I have done as a maritime intelligence officer,” Ballard said. “We didn’t want the Soviets to know where the submarine was.”

Despite the years of planning, he was not optimistic that he would find Ballard Titanic for two reasons: the time allocated for the search was short, and a French team, a French team of Engineer Jean-Louis Michel from the French Occupational Institution cooperated by Ballard, was using a new, sophisticated ship.

“The agreement was that the French would find it, Bal Ballard said,“ (and) after finding it, I would have had a lot of time for a week, it would be enough to film it. ”

When the French team was close, he kidnapped his wreckage, and Ballard detected the wreckage with the help of a significant narrowed search area after the French Sonar scan, as he described it.

Ballard called the scorpio sub -the wreckage of Scorpio Sub, which is very important for the success of the task, called the “Light Rifle Moment”. The wreckage area was not a small circular area, as expected, but a mile -long trace. Heavier objects sank directly to the base of the sea, but lighter residues fell to a slower rate, and the ocean currents made them further away.

He realized that the Titanic, which fell to a similar depth with the Scorpion Sub, would have a similar way to the debris, but it would be easier to search for the flow of Detritus than to find the body and other heavy parts of the ship.

“This was technology and knowledge of how to use it, Yo said Yoerger. But at the same time, büyük The biggest thing that caused our success was Ballard’s strategy. He was not trying to find the ship, he was trying to find the debris area, a much larger target, and is particularly suitable for finding with your eye spheres. ”

Discovery added a new word to the dictionary

In 1985, Argo took Titanic’s black and white video, while an old system called Angus with the 35 mm camera system, caught the blue -colored immobilized images that reveal the existence of the debris. A year later, the team returned with more advanced, colorful cameras to record every centimeter of the wreck, including the ship’s swimming pool, large stairs and bow, and still produced familiar iconic images today.

Ballard was also the first person to visit the wreck through Alvin, a crew, which had previously piloted the crew, to reach the sea base for more than two hours to reach the sea base. Once there, he saw touching works, including a child’s baby, unopened champagne bottles and silver items. Human ruins did not see.

Pust Parks covered Titanic, which created long, reddish pointed ends on the metal, a phenomenon called “rustictles bir, a word that entered later Oxford english dictionary.

Ballard remembered that some areas covered with a protective pink paint when the ship was built looked unspoiled. To protect the “very sacred ground, Ballard said that he advocated a similar approach to prevent further abrasion of the wreck – perhaps defending using protective paint by underwater robots.

Rewriting science textbooks

Titanic’s last resting place was far from a single discovery in a long and distinguished career as a scientist and explorer of Ballard. ExPedations Middle Atlantic Back Provided basic evidence for plate tectonicsDuring a journey to the sea base Galápagos Rift revealed its existence hydrothermal ventilation and fantastic life forms They live in them – shows that life can develop without sunlight and can collapse new theories about its origins.

Ballard continued to discover a few other debris: Nazi Warship Bismarkaircraft carrier USS Yorktown and President John F. Kennedy II. PT-109, a navy ship commanded in the middle of their 20s during World War II.

However, the gold touch fell in 2019 when Amelia Earhart’s flight was emptied. Explorer said he thought it would be possible to find a plane with the help of new technologies. “Still in our check box,” he said.

Although the officer operated by a human being is still a role to play, the future of ocean discoveries is distant and robotic, and ultimately, ships will endure the oceans of the world. To date, Approximately 27% of the sea base were mapped.

After the fictional character in Jules Verne’s “twenty thousand legals under the sea, Ballard,” Now more than one AUV, autonomous (underwater) vehicle, a package of dogs you can send, we can also put it in the water.… We can put all these beings in the water.

“I mean, everything is below.

Yoerger focused away from the ocean base and develops A underwater robot that can discover the twilight zone – Just beyond the ocean surface, it plays an important role in regulating the climate of the world by alleviating the rise of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere just beyond the sunlight under 200 to 1,000 meters (approximately 650 to 3,300 feet).

83 years old, Ballard is still actively discovering the ocean. In July, he returned from a 21 -day campaign in Nautilus, run by Ocean Exploration Trust, who was not a profit. To Guadalcanal, on the Solomon Islands In the Pacific. There, between August and December 1942, five great II. World War II began to match the ships and planes lost during the sea war.

Ballard said, “When the kids tell me to stop discovering something, so I have something to find,” Ballard said.

However, he said he was sure that many unknowns about the ocean for new generation explorers.

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