The discovery of the Titanic in 1985 was only the beginning. Ballard returned to the Titanic the following year, and this time, the ship was much easier to find. Researchers already knew its exact location, 380 miles southeast of Newfoundland, which was thirteen miles southeast of the position given in its final distress call. On this expedition, the team was able to take a lot more photos. More details took shape about the ship’s last moments, too. Researchers confirmed that it did, in fact, break in half before it sank.

Scientists who have been studying the ship and its components also have some new ideas about why the Titanic sank. Though much of the hull is buried in mud, experts were able to use sonar to map the damage to those six watertight compartments. Fragments of steel were also recovered from the hull, and when scientists studied it, they noticed two big problems. Researchers from Canada’s Defence Research Establishment Atlantic (DREA) found that the steel had jagged edges, suggesting something called brittle fracture, which happens when metals that are supposed to be pliable become more rigid. That can be caused by low temperatures, high sulfur content in steel, and high-impact speeds—all three of which came into play the night the Titanic hit the iceberg. The science behind this wasn’t known at the time the Titanic was built. The ship’s engineers didn’t know about brittle fracture, so they couldn’t have predicted what would happen.

MEET THE ROBOT RESEARCHERS

The human explorers and researchers who located the wreck of the Titanic and studied it later on had help from a team of robots. Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution has a small fleet of robotic researchers that aid scientists in exploring the deep sea.

Argo is the system of video cameras and sonar that helped scientists locate and see the wreck of the Titanic. It’s towed by a surface vessel—the Knorr, in the case of the Titanic discovery—and can take wide-angle video from fifty to one hundred feet above the ocean floor. Systems like Argo often explore an undersea location before humans go down to check it out.

When researchers returned to the Titanic in 1986, they had a new ship and some new vehicles to work with.

Alvin is a three-person submarine, also known as a DSV, or deep-submergence vehicle. It can take scientists fourteen thousand feet under the sea in a dive that lasts up to eight hours. It takes two hours to go down and another two to get back to the surface, so researchers have about four hours to take photographs, collect samples, and do experiments. Alvin has made almost five thousand dives, including those that helped map the wreck of the Titanic.

Jason Jr. is a remotely operated vehicle, or ROV, that helped scientists on their 1986 Titanic mission. It’s attached to Alvin by a fiber-optic cable that’s three hundred feet long and is controlled by a pilot inside Alvin. Because Jason Jr. is smaller, it can go places that Alvin can’t fit. When it was surveying the Titanic, Jason Jr. towed an imaging sled called Angus, which can take photos while navigating rough underwater terrain.

You might think that once the Titanic had been found, people would agree to leave it alone. It is a grave site, after all, right? But there have been numerous expeditions since then, including some that salvaged artifacts from the wreck and others that even brought tourists to see it.

Since 1987, a private company called RMS Titanic Inc. has brought up around 5,500 artifacts from the wreck, including a piece of the hull, china from the dining rooms, and passengers’ personal possessions.

The artifacts were displayed at special exhibitions where people could pay to see them until the company that ran those displays went out of business in 2016. Several museums got together to try to return the artifacts to the United Kingdom, but a group of investors ended up getting them instead.

In 1995, filmmaker James Cameron visited the shipwreck. He hired two Russian submarines, built special cameras, and put them in titanium cases that could withstand the pressure of the ocean at that depth. He ended up using the footage in Titanic, his famous movie about the disaster.

In the 1990s, you didn’t have to be a famous movie director to visit the ship. You just had to have a lot of money. Several groups started offering tourists the chance to go down in a submersible to see the Titanic firsthand. One couple even got married in a submarine on the deck of the ship in 2001.

The last of those controversial trips ended in 2012, but another private company has announced plans to start them up again soon. It’ll cost over $100,000 per person to go.

All this time, there was more research happening on the shipwreck, too. Historians still had so many questions about how the Titanic sank. In 2010, they got some answers when autonomous robots went down to map the site. They took more than a hundred thousand photographs, and the team also used side-scanning sonar to make a complete map of the wreck and its debris field. It showed how hundreds of objects and ship parts landed on the ocean floor and provided answers to some of those questions. Did the stern plunge straight down or rotate as it sank? Marks on the ocean floor suggest it spun around on its way down.

Other evidence, presented to WHOI by History Channel divers in 2005, suggests that those eyewitness accounts about the ship breaking in half might not be the whole story. Some researchers now wonder if the ship may have broken into three pieces as it sank, which means it could have gone down even more quickly than previously thought. Other scientists disagree with that theory. The more researchers study the Titanic, the more they learn. And then even more questions arise. But one thing scientists and historians agree on is the need to protect this historic shipwreck.

In 2012, the Titanic wreck got some special protection from UNESCO, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization. That group’s 2001 Convention on the Protection of the Underwater Cultural Heritage was established to protect sites like the Titanic wreck from treasure hunting and overexploration. The sites had to have been underwater for at least a hundred years, though, to qualify for that protection. Titanic hit that mark in 2012 and got the official designation then.

Certain kinds of exploration are still allowed, however. In August 2019, researchers made the first crewed dives on the Titanic since 2005. A group called Caladan Oceanic made five manned submersible dives on the ship over eight days. They filmed their work for a National Geographic documentary called Mission Titanic, and took photographs of the ship that will be used to make 3-D models.

When researchers surfaced from their dives, they had troubling news to share. The Titanic is beginning to fall apart. Ocean currents, corrosion from salt, and bacteria that live in the sea have been taking a toll on the famous ship for more than a hundred years now. The hull is starting to collapse. The worst decay is on the starboard side of the officers’ quarters. Even though the cold water of the North Atlantic has slowed the ship’s decay, mollusks have eaten lots of the wood, and bacteria have been eating the metal, creating what scientists call rusticles—dripping rust formations that look like icicles under the sea.

Scientists are concerned that it could be just a few decades before the Titanic deteriorates completely. While most people won’t have the chance to visit before then, there are other ways to learn about the famous ship and imagine what it might have been like to be a passenger.

In 2012, Titanic Belfast opened in Northern Ireland. The museum includes documents and artifacts from the ship as well as a ride that takes visitors on a trip through the sights and sounds of the shipyard.

And there may one day be a full-scale replica of the Titanic as well. An Australian billionaire has been building one in China since 2012 and has plans to set sail with his Titanic II when it is complete. The plan is to go from China to Dubai, head for Southampton to re-create the original ship’s voyage (hopefully without the iceberg this time), and continue around the globe.

The multimillion-dollar replica will have the same cabin layout and dining rooms as the original but better safety and navigation features. Even so, not everyone approves of the project. Some say it’s just not cool to re-create a ship that ended up being the final resting place for so many victims of the wreck.

A 3-D rendering of the Titanic II

More than a century after the disaster, the story of the Titanic continues to captivate the world—and there’s been no end to the legends and rumors surrounding the shipwreck. Some of them are true—or partly true, anyway. The rest? Well, they need to be smashed with some facts.

THE RUMOR:

THE TITANIC NEVER REALLY SANK!

THE DETAILS: Some conspiracy theorists claim that it was actually the Titanic’s sister ship, the Olympic, that went down. They’ve suggested that the White Star Line switched the two ships before the Titanic’s voyage in a scheme designed to collect insurance money later on. The theory suggests that after the Olympic had that accident that delayed the launch of the Titanic, it was too damaged to be profitable. So maybe the owners sent out the Olympic in place of the Titanic, knowing it would likely sink and they’d get to collect the insurance money!

THE REAL DEAL: There’s absolutely no evidence to support this theory. The two ships were similar, but they weren’t identical, and it would have been almost impossible for the White Star Line to pass off a year-old ship as brand-new. This story needs smashing!

THE RUMOR:

A COAL FIRE DOOMED THE TITANIC BEFORE ITS MAIDEN VOYAGE EVEN BEGAN.

THE DETAILS: In a documentary that aired on the Smithsonian Channel in 2017, journalist Senan Molony made the case that a coal fire on the Titanic weakened the ship’s hull, making it more vulnerable to damage from the iceberg.

THE REAL DEAL: There are photographs from the shipyard that show a black streak on the outside of the hull’s starboard side. Engineers say that could have been caused by a coal fire, and there are mentions of such a fire in historical documents. But did the fire cause the disaster? Probably not. Many experts believe that it may have sped things up a little but that the ship would have gone down anyway.

THE RUMOR:

PRICELESS TREASURES SANK WITH THE TITANIC!

THE DETAILS: There were rumors after the Titanic sank that a famous gem called the Hope Diamond had been on board—and that it was cursed, so that caused the wreck! There were whispers that the diamond was secretly being taken to America, and even though that was never confirmed, at least one newspaper reported it anyway.

THE REAL DEAL: The Hope Diamond wasn’t on the Titanic, and it’s not at the bottom of the ocean now. It’s at the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History in Washington, DC, where it doesn’t seem to be cursing anyone. But there were treasures on the Titanic. A number of the ship’s wealthy passengers had jewelry with them, and some of that was recovered from the wreck. Other artifacts from the ship, including the bandmaster’s violin, have sold at auction for more than a million dollars apiece.

THE RUMOR:

A CURSED MUMMY ON BOARD THE TITANIC CAUSED THE WRECK!

THE DETAILS: Okay, so maybe the Hope Diamond didn’t curse the ship. But how about a bad-luck mummy? Another rumor that spread after the shipwreck claimed that the supposedly cursed mummy of the princess of Amen-Ra had been purchased by an American collector and was in the hold of the doomed ship.

THE REAL DEAL: A quick look at the ship’s manifest, which lists all the cargo on board, shows there were no mummies on the Titanic. A passenger on the ship was reportedly talking about the cursed mummy at dinner one night, though, which may be how the rumor started, even though he never claimed it was on the ship.