Titanic Wreckage Was Found 40 Years Ago and Robert Ballard Remembers How

On this day 40 years ago, a crew aboard a Navy-owned research vessel came across an object in the North Atlantic that would forever change deep sea exploration and further stoke interest in the most famous maritime disaster in history. 

On Sept. 1, 1985, the members of the Knorr, which was on a mission to search for the wreckage of the Titanic, saw through video feeds what they suspected was one of the ship’s boilers.

News of the find prompted Robert Ballard, then-head of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution’s (WHOI) Deep Submergence Lab, to come out of the ship’s bunk and see for himself. 

“As I came in, we had a picture of the boiler on the wall, and we looked,” Ballard recalled to CNN in a new anniversary piece. “We realized it was definitely [from the] Titanic, and all bedlam grew loose.”

According to the WHOI, after finding the boiler, the Knorr followed debris to the north and came across the Titanic’s wreckage itself — 73 years after the purportedly unsinkable ship infamously sank into the bottom of the sea.

Ballard had previously searched for the Titanic in a 1977 expedition that failed — an experience that made him realize that underwater remotely operated vehicles (or ROVs) relaying images back to the exploration vessel would be an effective way to map the sea floor, according to CNN.

That led to the development of Argo, which a video camera system and side-scan sonar that could then transmit images in real time to the Knorr. 

As Ballard remembered to CNN, the Navy was interested in the Argo technology to determine why two nuclear submarines, USS Thresher and the USS Scorpion, sank in the Atlantic in the 1960s.

The military branch eventually backed Argo’s development. 

“What people didn’t know at the time, at least a lot of the people, was that the Titanic [search] was cover for a top-secret military operation I was doing as a naval intelligence officer,” Ballard told CNN. “We didn’t want the Soviets to know where the submarine was.”

In addition to Argo, the Knorr carried ANGUS, one of the first uncrewed camera systems that would photograph the wreckage once it was found. 

“It was the technology and the knowledge of how to use it,” senior scientist Dana Yoerger, who was a member of Ballard’s team, told CNN, adding that “the big thing that led to our success was Ballard’s strategy.”

“He wasn’t trying to find the ship,” Yoerger said, “he was trying to find the debris field, which is a much bigger target, and one that’s particularly well-suited to finding with your eyeballs.”

Stewart Harris, chief engineer on the Argo project, described the Knorr’s discovery of the wreckage site as both “exciting” and “gut-wrenching.”

“Over 1,500 people lost their lives in the accident,” Harris said, according to a WHOI news release, “and with all the hoopla surrounding the discovery, it was important for us to be mindful of that. Nonetheless, the technology demonstration was an eye-opener for the oceanographic community.”

In 1986, Ballard and his team returned to site with more advanced color cameras to extensively document the wreckage, including the Titanic’s swimming pool, grand staircase and bow, CNN reported.

With a submersible called the Alvin, Ballard became the first person to visit the wreck where he saw more artifacts.

Following the discovery of the Titanic, Ballard, now 83 and an emeritus research scholar with WHOI, went on to find more wrecks, including that of the Nazi warship Bismarck, the aircraft carrier USS Yorktown and the PT-109 boat commanded by future President John F. Kennedy during World War II.

In 2012, on the 100th anniversary of the Titanic’s sinking, Ballard announced a museum exhibit in Connecticut about the disaster. 

“It was a very difficult hunt,” he said at the time.

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On the legacy of his team’s game-changing find from 40 years ago, Ballard said in a press statement per WHOI: “The discovery of the Titanic opened a new chapter in deep sea exploration, since the deep sea is the largest museum in the world with an estimated 3 million chapters of human history in its depths, most of which are waiting to be discovered by the next generation of underwater explorers.