Wreck of the RMS Titanic

Wreck of the RMS Titanic
Bow of the RMS Titanic, photographed in 2004
Event	Shipwreck of RMS Titanic
Cause	Struck an iceberg while on maiden voyage from Southampton to New York City
Location	370 miles south-southeast of Newfoundland, North Atlantic Ocean
Operator	White Star Line (now merged with Cunard)

The wreck of the RMS Titanic is located about 370 miles (600 km) south-southeast off the coast of Newfoundland, lying at a depth of about 12,500 feet (3,800 m) or about 2.37 miles (3.81 km). The liner sank in April 1912, when it hit an iceberg during its maiden voyage.

The wreck lies in two main pieces about a third of a mile (600 m) apart. The bow is still largely recognizable, despite its deterioration and the damage it sustained hitting the sea floor, and has a great deal of preserved interiors. The stern is completely ruined due to sinking 12,000 feet (3,700 m) and hitting the ocean floor, and is now only a heap of twisted metal, which may explain why it has barely been explored during expeditions to the Titanic wreck. A substantial section of the middle of the ship broke apart and is scattered in chunks across the sea bed. A debris field covering about 5 by 3 miles (8.0 km × 4.8 km) around the wreck contains hundreds of thousands of items spilled from the ship as she sank, ranging from passengers' personal effects to machinery, furniture, utensils and coal, as well as fragments of the ship herself. The bodies of the passengers and crew would have also been distributed across the debris field, but have since decomposed and been consumed by other organisms. Exploration of the wreckage found a pair of boots together on the sea floor where a passenger's body had lain.

Until 1985, the location and condition of the wreck were unknown. Numerous expeditions tried using sonar to map the sea bed in the hope of spotting the wreck, but failed due to a combination of bad weather, technological difficulties and poor strategy over a massive search area. The wreck was finally located, 13.2 miles (21.2 km) from the inaccurate position transmitted by Titanic's crew while the ship was sinking, by a joint French-American expedition led by Jean-Louis Michel of IFREMER and Robert Ballard of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. The key to its discovery was an innovative remotely controlled deep-sea vehicle called Argo, which could be towed above the sea bed while its cameras transmitted pictures back to a mother ship.