Preserving the Titanic

> Oceanographer Robert Ballard is calling on the world to help protect this mass grave

DISCOVERING the wreck of the legendary British luxury liner RMS Titanic made oceanographer Robert Ballard famous, but hasn’t made him happy, because it attracted disaster tourists and souvenir hunters to the site.

More than 1,500 men, women and children died in the icy waters of the North Atlantic after the ocean liner, on her maiden voyage from Southampton, England, to New York City, struck an iceberg late in the evening of April 14, 1912. Roughly 700 people survived.

On Sept 1, 1985, a joint USFrench expedition led by Ballard ( right) and fellow oceanographer Jean-Louis Michel located the wreck at a depth of 3,800 metres off the coast of Newfoundland.

In 1986, Ballard dove to the wreck for the first time in a manned deep-sea submersible accompanied by a small remotely-operated vehicle.

“It was an incredible experience,” he told dpa in an interview in 2012. “We carefully photographed it and made a complete mosaic of the ship.”

When he returned to the Titanic in 2004, much had changed.

The seafloor was littered with beer cans and other trash, he lamented in an article for National Geographic Magazine.

“I knew that a private salvage company, RMS Titanic Inc, had dived on her many times, legally

removing thousands of objects from what I consider a sacred grave,” Ballard wrote.

“Russian submarines had taken Hollywood filmmaker James Cameron (director of the 1997 blockbuster film Titanic) and others to the wreck, also breaking no laws, but reportedly colliding with the hull.

“Cruise ships had circled the site while RMS Titanic Inc tried to raise a 20-ton piece of the ship.

“A beer company had sponsored sweepstakes to watch the salvagers recover bottles of ale.

“And a New York couple had even plunked down on Titanic’s bow in a submersible to be married.

“It was all such a comedy – exactly what I had hoped would not happen.”

Ballard says the site is a mass grave and he treats it as such. “We ... show these people the dignity they deserve. I wouldn’t

go to a graveyard with a shovel simply because I like old watches.”

Ballard is nevertheless optimistic. “We believe we can preserve the wreck.”

He would like to have the Titanic’s hull cleaned and coated with corrosion-inhibiting antifouling paint as is currently done to supertankers’ hulls below the waterline.

“You have these robots that attach themselves to the hull with magnets and then roll along the hull and clean and paint it,” said Ballard, who added that the metal-eating bacteria could be destroyed by injecting chemicals into the ship’s interior.

Every country is called on to contribute to the costly project, he said, pointing out that the wreck was lying in international waters.

“If you can’t protect the Titanic, what can you protect?” asked Ballard, who said he envisioned a sort of virtual museum at the site, in which camera-equipped underwater robots along with stationary cameras gave Titanic fans live looks at the most famous shipwreck of all

time. – dpa