There was no prior knowledge on my part; I guess that once the cat was out of the bag, a lot of people figured it out pretty quickly. [stderr]
The new National Geographic exhibition about the Titanic specifically describes Ballard as having gotten to make his dives in return for the work he did searching for the Thresher and the Scorpion. [wapo]
Led by Robert Ballard, an oceanographer and underwater archaeologist, the dive took place only because of an ambitious barter. Ballard had developed Argo, an unmanned deep-sea camera system that gave oceanographers unprecedented access to the ocean floor. He agreed to use the technology to search for the remains of the USS Scorpion and the USS Thresher, two Navy nuclear submarines that sank during the 1960s. In exchange, the Navy financed the Titanic mission.
Ballard succeeded in all three missions, and the previously classified story anchors the exhibition. It includes artifacts such as the Alvin, the research sub that documented the wreckage of the Titanic, and memorabilia from the Scorpion’s launch.
I’m including this because it’s a really great rendering. It’s actually quite dark down there where the Titanic rests; it’ll never be seen so clearly again.
That’s an amazing photo, at first glance it looks like a model, then as you focus on details you realise how large the Titanic was, how big those casually folded and ripped sheets of steel are compared to the tiny windows.
It’s not a photo, it’s “a really great rendering” (as Marcus says). There isn’t enough light down there for photography on that scale – it’s “quite dark” in much the same way that it’s “quite damp”, and you’d need a truly mind-boggling lighting rig to illuminate the scene like that.
Also, an actual photo would show a lot more deterioration of the wreckage, such as the so-called rusticles that are rapidly eating away the steel.
It always impresses me just how forcefully a sinking ship impacts the sea floor. Somehow I tend to have the impression that a wreck would drift down like a falling leaf, coming to rest gently on the bottom. Instead it’s more like a plane crash on land.
As Dunc said above, it’s an illustration, not a photo. That image is from a painting by Ken Marschall. Ken has done illustrations like this for many of Robert Ballard’s finds and they are featured in the big coffee table books that Ballard has written. His paintings of the Bismarck and the Yorktown are particularly nice as well.
DonDueed@#3:
It always impresses me just how forcefully a sinking ship impacts the sea floor. Somehow I tend to have the impression that a wreck would drift down like a falling leaf, coming to rest gently on the bottom. Instead it’s more like a plane crash on land.
Yeah, and in the case of Titanic it pretty much went point-first like a great big lawn dart, if lawn darts weighed 52,000 tons.
I think I’ve read that the bottom impact of a certain wreck (not sure if it was the Titanic or perhaps one of the WW2 warships) took place at something like 30MPH. So also not unlike a lawn dart.
I suppose a wooden ship would sink more slowly if it was close to neutral bouyancy. Is that why the Vasa could be raised?
Ballard discovering the Titanic while looking for the Scorpion was publicly confirmed in 2008. Nat Geo even had a special on it then. https://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2008/06/080602-titanic-secret.html
The first rumors I can recall I believe was due to him hinting that this was the case in his 1995 autobiography, Explorations. I misplaced/lost my copy at some point over the last 12 years, otherwise I’d look it up.
I’ve read before that what I (as a naive child) believed was just discovery and science for the sake of discovery and science, actually had a less-than-pure motive. Ah well. That bubble of mine needed to be burst but it still makes me sad that discovery and exploration rarely occur for the sake of discovery and exploration; turns out it’s often more about how we can kill other people, or get an edge over other people so we can kill them if we happen to feel like.