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    Finding the Titanic: How Images from the Ocean Depths Fueled Interest in the Doomed Ship
    Finding the Titanic: How Images from the Ocean Depths Fueled Interest in the Doomed Ship
    Finding the Titanic: How Images from the Ocean Depths Fueled Interest in the Doomed Ship
    Ebook79 pages41 minutes

    Finding the Titanic: How Images from the Ocean Depths Fueled Interest in the Doomed Ship

    By Michael Burgan

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    About this ebook

    On the night of April 14, 1912, as it made its first voyage, the luxury steamship Titanic struck an iceberg. Then, a few hours after midnight on April 15, the ship sank thousands of feet before settling on the ocean floor. And that's where it stayed, whereabouts unknown, for the next 73 years until it was discovered by oceanographer Robert Ballard and his crew. The pictures and video Ballard brought back from the 1985 discovery helped stir new interest in the Titanic's voyage and its resting spot.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherCapstone Young Readers
    Release dateAug 1, 2017
    ISBN9780756556853
    Finding the Titanic: How Images from the Ocean Depths Fueled Interest in the Doomed Ship
    Author

    Michael Burgan

    Michael Burgan has written more than 250 books for children and young adults. His specialty is history, with an emphasis on biography. A graduate of the University of Connecticut with a degree in history, Burgan is also a produced playwright and the editor of The Biographer’s Craft, the newsletter for Biographers International Organization. He first started writing for children as an editor at Weekly Reader before beginning his freelance career in 1994. He lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

    Read more from Michael Burgan

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      Book preview

      Finding the Titanic - Michael Burgan

      Cover

      Chapter One

      SEARCHING FOR THE TITANIC

      Robert Ballard looked out over the North Atlantic Ocean and wondered whether he would find what he was looking for. Somewhere beneath the Knorr, the ship that had carried him to this spot, lay the remains of the Titanic. After years of research, Ballard was convinced he had found the area where the great steamship had come to rest more than 70 years earlier. On the night of April 14, 1912, as it made its first voyage, the Titanic had struck an iceberg almost 400 miles (645 kilometers) southeast of Newfoundland, Canada. A few hours after midnight on April 15, the ship sank nearly 2.5 miles (4 km) before settling on the ocean floor. Of the more than 2,200 passengers and crew, only 705 had survived.

      The sinking of the Titanic was one of the world’s worst disasters at sea.

      Ballard knew that time was running out to find the Titanic on this trip. The U.S. Navy had paid for him to find and investigate two of its submarines that had sunk during the 1960s. After Ballard finished that search, he could use whatever time was left on his three-week assignment to hunt for the Titanic. Now, on the night of August 31, 1985, Ballard had only a few days left to find the wreck. And a storm was approaching.

      Ballard had once said that with the proper equipment and crew, finding the Titanic would be easy. But now he began to wonder. The equipment for his expedition included sophisticated sonar on board the French research ship Le Suroit. Sonar uses sound waves to locate objects underwater. A device called a transducer sends out the waves. When a wave hits an object, it bounces back to the transducer as an echo that can be seen on a screen. Le Suroit towed an advanced side-scan sonar, which can locate objects on the ocean floor. Fan-shaped sound waves radiate out from what is called a towfish. The waves’ echoes appear on a screen as areas of light and dark, depending on their strength. Light patches indicate the sonar has found something sticking out from the bottom. After several weeks of searching, however, Le Suroit had not found the Titanic in the area where Ballard thought it would be.

      He had then turned to the next piece of underwater technology: a sledlike submersible called Argo. Also known as a remotely operated vehicle (ROV), Argo let Ballard safely study the ocean floor for long periods in the dangerously strong water pressure. Ballard, an oceanographer who specialized in geology, had just built Argo with a team of engineers at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts. The Titanic project gave him a chance to test it.

      Argo was equipped with video cameras that used technology developed by the U.S. military. The cameras could detect natural light and magnify it 10,000 times. With the cameras, Ballard later wrote, he could literally see in the dark.¹ That capability was crucial at 12,500 feet (3,810 meters), since at that great depth only faint traces of sunlight reach the ocean’s bottom. Argo was attached to the Knorr by a cable called a tether. Inside the cable were wires that carried information back and forth between the submersible and the ship’s crew. The crew members controlled Argo’s movement and reviewed the images from its cameras.

      The submersible Argo was named for the vessel that carried

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