Emily Chan
For the first time since the disastrous OceanGate submersible incident of last summer, an expedition team has headed on a mission to the site of the Titanic wreckage.
The project is being led by RMS Titanic Inc., a company based in the United States. They won exclusive rights to the shipwreck, which were granted to them in 1994 after an intense legal battle.
This will be the company’s ninth journey to the Titanic. Their last trip was in 2010. So far, they have found around 5,500 objects from the wreck. The latest expedition involves exploring the seabed with remotely operated vehicles. That means there’s no risk of deadly implosions!
It was launched from Providence, Rhode Island, on July 12. The team’s ship, Dino Chouest, will sail above the wreck for approximately 20 days.
Researchers plan to map out the site in detail and recover more artifacts from the wreckage. The remotely operated vehicles will help them capture images to assess the condition of the ship and how much it has degraded since 2010. The images will also be used to create a three-dimensional model of the ship.
“We want to see the wreck with a clarity and precision that’s never before been achieved,” said David Gallo, an oceanographer and the co-leader of the expedition.
It will take somewhere between two and two and a half hours for the team’s submersible to reach the bottom of the ocean. The researchers also hope to use their mission to honor the lives lost during the sinking of the Titanic, in addition to those who perished in the OceanGate incident.
The Titanic sank in the North Atlantic Ocean 112 years ago, on April 15, 1912, after it struck an iceberg during its first voyage from Southampton in England to New York. The vessel was discovered in 1985 off the east coast of Canada and was located about 12,500 feet below the water’s surface.
Last year, on June 18, Titan, a submersible operated by the Seattle-based company OceanGate, imploded while on a private trip to view the wreckage site of the Titanic. All five people onboard were killed. Four of them were extremely wealthy guests who had paid $250,000 a ticket for the journey.
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