Instead, he would use Argo to scour the bottom for its much larger debris trail, which might stretch as far as a mile. With this in mind, he decided not to search for Titanic’s hull. While photographing Thresher and Scorpion, he’d noticed that the current had carried small bits of wreckage from the ships as they fell to the seafloor, creating a long chain of debris. The job of finding Titanic fell to Ballard and the crew of Knoor, who had just wrapped up their survey of Scorpion.īallard’s military project left him with just 12 days to look for Titanic, but it had also given him an idea for a new search technique. Despite trawling the Atlantic for five weeks, the sonar failed to uncover any promising leads. Using a technique known as “mowing the lawn,” expedition leader Jean-Louis Michel towed a side-scan sonar system back and forth across the search zone in the hope of detecting large metal objects on the seafloor. In July 1985, the French research vessel Le Suroit began scouting the area where Titanic was believed to have sunk. Ballard knew the Navy mission would leave him with precious little time to seek out Titanic, so he asked the French Research Institute for Exploitation of the Sea, or IFREMER, to partner with him. The following year, he and a team from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution returned to the Atlantic and tracked down the wreck of Scorpion off the coast of the Azores. It wasn’t until the 2000s that the mission’s military agenda was fully declassified.īallard began his clandestine expedition by photographing Thresher in the summer of 1984. Ballard was given special instructions and put on active duty as a Naval officer, but as far as the rest of the world was concerned, he was simply an oceanographer on a search for Titanic. Since the United States was still embroiled in the Cold War, the operation was kept top-secret. The two parties eventually came to a compromise: if Ballard could successfully locate and map the two sunken subs, he could use whatever time he had left to look for Titanic. Thresher and Scorpion, two nuclear submarines that had been lost in the Atlantic in the 1960s. The Navy balked at footing the bill for a Titanic search, but they were interested in using Ballard’s new robot to survey the wrecks of the U.S.S. Navy to fund the development of the Argo, an unmanned camera sled that could be towed behind a surface ship at depths of up to 20,000 feet. (Credit: Ralph White/CORBIS)īallard’s second search attempt had been in the works since the early 1980s, when he asked the U.S. The crew of Knorr prepare to launch ARGO.

Titanic seek and find game