Time, Tide and Man Take Toll on Titanic
June 4, 2004 — -- If you travel some 450 miles east of Newfoundland, into the cold immensity of the North Atlantic Ocean, you will come to a spot that's unremarkable in every way, except for what lies below.
Two and a half miles down lies the iron soul of the greatest shipwreck of all time: the R.M.S. Titanic.
This week, Robert Ballard, the National Geographic explorer in residence and the man who discovered the Titanic wreckage in 1985, made a bittersweet return to the ship.
Ballard — along with scientists from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and a team from the National Geographic Society — has come back to document the decay — and some say the "desecration" — of this underwater graveyard.
Ten years ago, a U.S. federal court awarded an Atlanta company called RMS Titanic Inc. sole salvage rights to the ship. But as you might imagine, that court order has been nearly impossible to enforce. There are no shipwreck police or security guards out in the vast, wild North Atlantic. So the Titanic, alone at the bottom of the ocean for so many years, has most certainly been host to many souvenir-seeking visitors.
All told, it's been estimated that as many as 8,000 artifacts may have been hauled away as "salvage" from the liner — everything from the ship's china to a part of its hull.
While Ballard wants to study the site, he is hoping the Titanic and all the history it holds can be preserved. "To me, the Titanic is an old lady in her grave, and we are taking the jewels off this old lady, can't she have her jewels in her grave?"
Of course, in many ways the old lady's most precious jewel is her story, which, like the ship itself, is of epic proportions.
Ballard paints a picture of April 14, 1912, the night of the ship met its doom.
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