Titanic at 100: Preserve the wreck or let it go?
— -- Celebrated, investigated and to some extent salvaged, the storied wreck of the "unsinkable" RMS Titanic rests nearly 2½ miles down on the muddy floor of the North Atlantic.
A tomb for some of the 1,500 men, women and children who died with the ship, a symbol of a grand, lost world to others, Titanic remains above all an enduring icon, a symbol of the limits of human genius against the raw force of nature.
But if the wreck is left untouched, nature will finish much of the job the iceberg started, in time dissolving much of the ship's remains in the ocean elements, says University of Rhode Island explorer Robert Ballard, who co-led the team that discovered the ship's resting place in 1985.
Now, as the 100th anniversary of the disaster April 15, 1912, approaches, U.S. officials and experts are pushing for decisions on what the future should be for the world's most famous shipwreck. Should it be preserved? And if so, what's the best way to ensure its legacy?
"Titanic is a wreck that the world cannot leave alone," says archaeologist James Delgado, chief of the maritime heritage office at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). "We can't raise her, and we can't keep her forever as it is now. But we can celebrate her and let her tell her story to future generations."
In 1985, a team led by oceanographers Ballard, then with the Woods Hole (Mass.) Oceanographic Institute, and Jean-Louis Michel of the French Ocean Institute discovered the shipwreck. They deployed sonar to track the field of debris left behind as the 882-foot-long liner sank, ripping in half on its descent. The discovery started a quarter-century of international negotiations, courtroom fights and moviemaking stardom for the ship. (Titanic, the movie, gets a curtain call today when it's re-released in 3-D.)
The find "launched the realization that the deep sea was the biggest museum on Earth," Ballard says. "There's probably more history in the deep ocean than in all of the museums in the world combined."
The great ship's watery grave
Even a century later, though, exactly who should be the curator of this deep-water "museum" and its artifacts is a point of contention.
Last August, U.S. District Court Judge Rebecca Beach Smith awarded the exhibition firm RMS Titanic Inc. the rights to roughly 5,000 artifacts salvaged from the wreck site in six expeditions since 1993. The court's caveat: The items must be put up for auction in one lot. Many of the artifacts are exhibited in traveling shows, and they range from jewelry to jackets to an 18-ton piece of hull that is now on permanent display at the Luxor Hotel in Las Vegas.
And far from the desert of Las Vegas, the wreck rests in pitch-darkness, sprawled across 1,000 acres of ocean floor.
The ship's bow plunged 60 feet into the mud at the end of its descent, the famous prow still towering above the seafloor. Turned backward and twisted like a beer can, the ship's battered stern lies roughly in line with the bow about 2,000 feet away. Scattered about the wreckage are bits of the hull, small boilers, plates, luggage, wine bottles, shoes and other personal items the passengers and crew of a luxury liner would have had at their disposal.
"Likely there are millions of artifacts," says NOAA attorney Ole Varmer. And there are possibly human remains: "The shipwreck is a tomb and a memorial, as well as a time capsule."
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