The Titanic wreck was found 73 years after it sank
On this day · 1 September 1985
After seventy-three years lost in the dark, the Titanic gave itself away with a single rusted boiler.
Just after 1:00 a.m. on September 1, 1985, a camera sled named Argo drifted over the North Atlantic seabed and caught the round outline of a ship’s boiler. The wreck of RMS Titanic had finally been found, 73 years after it sank in 1912.
The discovery was a joint French-American effort: oceanographer Robert Ballard of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution and Jean-Louis Michel of France’s IFREMER. Rather than hunt the hull directly, Ballard chased the debris trail scattered as the ship broke apart, a smarter bet across roughly 100 square miles of seafloor about 400 miles off Newfoundland.
The wreck lay under more than 12,400 feet of water, well over two miles down.
The ship rested in two main pieces, the bow driven into the mud. What had been an unreachable legend became a real place on a map, and a grave that the deep had kept hidden for three generations.
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