Seabed science helped detect the wreck of the Titanic

Today, anyone with adventurous money and blood can dive to visit the wreck of the Titanic under the deep sea.

But behind these exciting discovery tours is another long and difficult story about a scientific research effort.

After the Titanic sank to the sea on April 15, 1912, it was planned to salvage it. Many ideas are outlined, including tying air bubbles to a ship or using a magnet to bring it ashore.

But these ideas are hard to come by because finding Titanic at the bottom of the North Atlantic Ocean becomes very difficult.

Titanic wreck on the seabed

French and American scientists were then assigned to the task of developing the necessary technology to lead humanity to the Titanic's tomb."You need good tools and historical knowledge good enough to know where to find the ship" - Jean-Louis Michel, the engineer and the first to see the image of Titanic, recounted.

Michel is a member of the French Marine Exploration Research Institute (FRIES), and a researcher at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) in Massachusetts.

On July 10, 1985, all boarded the French research ship Le Suroit off to find the legendary wreck.

"In terms of sound wave radar (sonar), we have the best equipment in the world and Americans have developed a means of diving with high-sensitivity camera cameras of the best kind then" - he said. - "So combining these devices and sharing the burden of research activities becomes feasible".

Researchers collected all the traces they could find, such as a shipping log from a ship discovered near the disaster area, witness testimony, weather data and ocean currents. from searches in 1977, 1980, 1981 and 1983.

They narrowed the search area to 400 square kilometers, nearly five times the size of Manhattan.

The group sought cautiously to set up a scan of the new sonar and a magnetometer, which received unusual magnetic signals emitted by a large metal object, down to the sea floor.

Day after day, Le Suroit and its probes were only 15-20m from the seabed, scouring a very long seabed area up to 1km wide.

On May 25, Le Suroit was sent to another mission, so a WHOI ship named Knorr was replaced. It is under the command of oceanographer Robert Ballard.

Ballard deployed a remote-controlled submarine called Argo, which was very expensive then, to the bottom of the sea. On September 1 of that year, when watching through the computer screen on Knorr, Michel became the first person in 73 years to see the Titanic.

"The first thing I saw was something unusual under the sea floor. The seabed structure was changing. When the train advanced a few meters, I saw a reflection shining on the screen - the sign of something. that is made of metal " - he said.

As the camera progresses, the metallic light appears more and more and finally the pieces of Titanic are seen.

But no one was sure that this was Titanic.

"The next step, we approach a piece of a large metal ship, about 4 meters in diameter and 8 meters in height. In fact, this is a boiler on board and I recognized it from Titanic photos." he said. Michel also said that "this amazing" discovery brought him a sense of success mixed with chills.

"I thought about all those victims who died in cold water. Because we were exactly where they had died," he said.

The group eventually found the wreck, broken into two pieces and located about 21.2 km away from the location where it was last reported. This mistake, caused by the Titanic crew, caused all previous Titanic searches to fail.

According to the WHOI, ocean detection tools today are very strong.

Robots can go deep into the ocean floor, helping the discovery work on behalf of humans, helping them to escape the risk of being killed by the cold and seabed pressure.

Technological advancement also satisfies the needs of people who want to reach the bottom of the sea to see for themselves.

Last month, James Cameroon, director of Titanic, went to the Mariana Trench, located at a depth of more than 11 km, on a special submarine.

British billionaire Richard Brandson is also building a "Virgin Oceanic" submarine that will help bring him to the Puerto Rico trench in the Atlantic.