Science: Haunting Images of Disaster

A silver tray nestled in sediment. Bottles of vintage Bordeaux wine scattered on the ocean floor. A gaping hole where once a giant smokestack had stood. The ship's bridge, damaged by a falling boom. These and other poignant images of disaster, all in Picasso blue, were distributed in Washington last week at a news conference held by Marine Geologist Robert Ballard, leader of the expedition that early this month located and photographed the sunken liner Titanic. They were only a few of the 12,000 photos shot at the bottom of the Atlantic by the unmanned submersibles Argo and Angus after they had been lowered 13,000 ft. beneath the waves from their mother ship, the U.S. Navy research vessel Knorr.

During the 90-minute conference, Ballard took his captivated audience on a kind of guided tour of the Titanic, running videotapes shot by the Argo as it was dragged by the Knorr back and forth in a series of passes over the site. The dramatic tapes clearly show the great ship sitting upright, pointing toward the north and covered with a fine layer of silt. The port and starboard anchor chains are wrapped around their capstans, still holding the anchors in place, and in the top deck there is a gaping hole that was once a skylight. Through it, Ballard told his viewers, "you can see right down the grand staircase." The railings and wooden deck are intact, the individual planks clearly visible. The davits still hang empty over the side, their lifeboats, which saved only 700 of the ship's 2,200 passengers, long gone.

Although the expedition reported shortly after the discovery that the Titanic was in "museum shape," the videotape shows that the stern is missing, and the Angus' still photos show wreckage, including a giant crane and a ship's telegraph, littering the ocean floor. Why the stern disintegrated remains a mystery. Ballard pointed out that there is no evidence on the ocean floor of any great impact, which suggests that the huge ship settled gently to the bottom. Only two of the Titanic's four mighty smokestacks remain in place; the others collapsed, perhaps when the ship's boilers exploded as they sank into the icy waters.

While the Argo was being maneuvered around the Titanic, Ballard revealed, it had a couple of close calls, once hitting the bridge, another time brushing against a smokestack. Despite his initial alarm, neither the Argo nor the Titanic was damaged in these encounters. But in the process, the submersible collected the only artifact so far brought up from the great liner: a smudge of paint scraped from the smokestack. Ballard also disclosed that after "mowing the lawn" with highly advanced technological gear (sweeping his sonar back and forth and checking its soundings with a magnetometer), the expedition had actually located the Titanic with a "25-year-old echo sounder. It could have been done in a fishing boat."