Sunday, October 6, 2024

Documenting the decline of the Titanic

 

News about the Titanic was dominated by the tragic (and preventable) loss of the Titan submersible. Since then, quietly, the wreck has been visited by a more professional and quieter operation (RMS Titanic Inc.), that is very carefully document the wreck as things slowly fall apart.

The Washington Post had a recent article about this effort (and there are several other articles about this online).  After they were basically done, they managed to find an iconic statue on their last dive.

Titanic divers find long-sought statue, signs of accelerating decay

"In 1986, an explorer captured an image of “Diana of Versailles,” a 2-foot-tall bronze statue of the Roman goddess, lying in the debris of the RMS Titanic, more than 12,000 feet deep in the Atlantic Ocean. Diana’s exact location was hard to pinpoint from that photo, and the site of the shipwreck was still shrouded in secrecy, so explorers who might have seen her over the years didn’t disclose where she was.

Until now. On their latest expedition, researchers with RMS Titanic Inc., the Georgia-based company with the sole rights to salvage from the wreck, rediscovered Diana’s precise location and photographed the statue, which once stood in the ship’s first class lounge. The images are among more than 2 million captured on the expedition this summer, the first since 2010. The expedition also revealed that a section of railing from the Titanic’s bow had fallen to the seafloor, a change that researchers say probably happened over the last two years."
What it looks like on the seafloor:

















And above the fireplace on the ship:





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