The Discovery of the lost titanic: A TALE OF A SECRET EXPEDITION

A hundred years ago, the Titanic sank taking more than 1500 souls with it. Robert Ballard who discovered the wreck revealed to the world that the discovery of the famous shipwreck was as a result of a top secret military expedition. 33 years ago today on September 1,1985 , the 73 year old Titanic wreckage was finally discovered. The tragedy of the RMS Titanic rocked the world on April 15,1912 when the “unsinkable” ship destined for the US, hit an iceberg taking hundreds of innocent lives with it. The Titanic movie of 1998 focused on the loss of life and parting from your beloved ones. The two imaginary characters Jack and Rose depicted the untold stories of so many lovers who lost each other during the shipwreck forever, the stories of the mother losing her child, not finding her husband again. The newly married couples disappearing into the Atlantic ocean of a million lost dreams could never see each other’s faces again. Robert Ballard’s life’s dream was to find the Titanic, but if not for the cold war and two missing submarines, the Titanic might never have been found. He was interested in ocean exploration as a child while reading 20,000 Leagues Under the sea. “ From a very early age, I wanted to be the Captain Nemo and i wanted to explore the ocean floor,” he says. With his family’s encouragement he joined the Navy,worked at the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration and became an oceanographer. After 53 years and more than 130 expeditions, the 69-year-old adventurer is still at it and hoping for a new discovery. Back in the 1970s, he had a failed expedition to do just that. But it wasn’t until 1985, while serving as a naval intelligence officer, that he was able to secure the technology and funding that helped him finally discover it 1,000 miles due east of Boston. Having helped the U.S. Navy develop unmanned submarines, Ballard thought the technology might be useful in finding the lost ship. The Navy had little interest in funding the search, but it was very interested in finding the USS Scorpion and the USS Thresher, two nuclear submarines that were lost in the 1960s on either side of where the Titanic went down. With the Cold War still in its final throes, the Navy had to keep the true nature of the submarine search a secret. They told Ballard that if he could find the subs, then afterward he could use their technology to search for the ship — but the world would think the expedition was about finding the Titanic from the beginning. “The Navy didn’t want to disclose the location of those submarines, so we needed a cover story and Titanic was the cover story,” says Ballard. “I wanted to find the Titanic. The Navy just wanted our expedition to deflect from the true mission.” The military wanted to know the fate of the nuclear reactors that powered the ships and to determine the safety of disposing nuclear materials in the ocean. People were so focused on the legend that they never connected the dots. In the early-morning hours of Sept. 1, the image of a boiler in the sand 12,000 feet beneath the surface signaled the discovery of the Titanic. “There were two reactions almost simultaneously,” says Ballard. “The first reaction was celebration, we all jumped up shouting because we were near the end of the expedition and we thought we were going to fail. But that was followed quickly by a realization of where we were, that we were on a graveyard. We started seeing where the bodies had landed, that this was a cemetery, and it changed our emotional wall. It went from pure joy to thoughtful reflection.” He adds that when he initially discovered the ship, he went to the 24 remaining survivors and various museums around the world, and “there wasn’t a single person or organization who supported recovering artifacts.” Whether because of humans or because of bacteria consuming the ship, there is a good chance Titanic will collapse completely within the next few decades. He certainly understands the enduring fascination. “Every generation has discovered the Titanic, whether it was the one that was alive when it sank, Walter Lord’s book, or my discovery, or Cameron’s movie, and now the 100th anniversary.” He also feels that the disaster has “all sorts of stories with heroes and villains, and I think everyone wonders what they would do if they were on the Titanic.” The explorer shows no signs of slowing. This summer he plans to explore the Mediterranean and the Black Sea, before heading to America’s Territorial Trust Islands in the western Pacific. Asked what his most important discovery is, he’d say, “The one I’m about to make”.