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Science1 September 1985

Discovery of the Titanic wreck

On 1 September 1985 an expedition led by America’s Robert Ballard and France’s Jean-Louis Michel found the wreck of the Titanic 3,800 m down on the Atlantic floor.

Titanic’s bow on the seabed, 3,800 m down
Titanic’s bow on the seabed, 3,800 m down

Courtesy of NOAA/Institute for Exploration/University of Rhode Island (NOAA/IFE/URI). · Public domain · Source

For more than seventy years no one knew where Titanic lay. In the summer of 1985 Jean-Louis Michel of the French oceanographic institute IFREMER and Robert Ballard of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution searched the seabed together. Early on 1 September the unmanned camera sled Argo, towed by the American research ship Knorr, showed a boiler lying on the bottom.

The wreck lay 3,800 m down in two pieces, bow and stern some 600 m apart — proving survivors right that the ship had broken in two at the surface. The next year Ballard dived to it in the submersible Alvin. In 2012, a century after the sinking, the wreck came under UNESCO’s protection as underwater cultural heritage.

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States and rulers at the time
United States — President Ronald Reagan
Places
Wreck of the Titanic

People

  • Robert Ballard1942

    key figure · American oceanographer who, with France’s Jean-Louis Michel, found the wreck of the Titanic on the Atlantic floor in 1985

Before and after

Earlier
1914 International Convention for the Safety of Life at Sea

Themes that include this event

  • The Titanic1911 – 1985

    From the launch of the “unsinkable” ship to her maiden voyage, the iceberg, Carpathia’s rescue, the convention that changed the rules of the sea, and the wreck found on the Atlantic floor more than seventy years later