The company that holds exclusive rights to salvage the Titanic shipwreck and ship’s artifacts filed in federal court on Saturday a map of the surrounding seabed showing where searchers found the twisted remains of the Titan submersible .
The map, a mosaic of sonar images annotated by experts at the company, RMS Titanic Inc., helps indicate how close the ship was to its intended destination when disaster struck.
The vehicle apparently exploded on the morning of Sunday, June 18, killing five crew members. RMS Titanic’s director of underwater research is on the tourist submersible’s final dive as a guest of Titan owner OceanGate.
The seabed map, attached to a legal filing as an exhibit, shows the ghostly outline of the Titanic’s bow section. This is one of the wreck’s most prominent features as deep explorers have shown over the decades that the prow and forward railings are quite intact, standing upright and almost proud in the dark darkness.
In an interview, Brian A. Wainger, an attorney for the salvor, RMS Titanic Inc., said the map is based on private and public information available to the company. He added that he had shared the seabed map with the United States Coast Guard, as well as the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and that neither federal body had raised any concerns about the accuracy of the representation.
“This is, we believe, reliable data,” said Mr. Wainger.
In his court appearance on July 8, Mr. Wainger said the Marine Board of Investigation, the branch of the Coast Guard investigating the disaster, will finish its detective work in about 12 to 18 months and then hold a public hearing where witnesses will testify. sworn testimony.
The story of the Titanic is well known. After hitting an iceberg on her maiden voyage in 1912, the luxury liner broke in two and plunged more than two miles through the North Atlantic to its icy bottom.
The wreck of the Titanic was located in 1985, and in 1994 the US District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia, located in Norfolk, Va., granted salvage rights on the RMS Titanic. As a designated salvor, defined as a person or group engaged in the recovery of a ship or objects lost at sea, the RMS Titanic was overseen by the court, which has long monitored shipwreck recovery cases.
Based in Atlanta, the company uses its salvage operations for several purposes, including setting up touring exhibitions of Titanic artifacts.
The map in the company’s filing shows a large dotted circle, labeled “Titan Debris Field,” somewhere to the right, or starboard side, of Titanic’s intact bow section. The map does not provide other details, such as field size. The map, however, calls the location approximate. The Coast Guard, when announcing on June 22 that the Titan submersible had suffered a catastrophic explosion, said the debris field was 1,600 feet from the Titanic’s bow.
Jessica Sanderspresident of RMS Titanic, said the seabed map was included in the legal filing as part of the company’s obligation to keep the court informed of its activities and, in this case, how it cooperated with the Titan investigation in hours and days after the submersible disappeared.
“We tried to help,” he said in an interview. “We gave them this map” so that investigators could better understand the features of the seabed around the Titanic and thus have a better chance of separating information about rocks and natural outcroppings from possible evidence of the vessel itself or its remains.
said Ms. Sanders said the map was partially developed by his employee who died in the Titan disaster — Paul-Henri Nargeolet, 77, a French submersible expert and an international authority on the Titanic, who was trying to make his 38th dive on the wreck. “So part of it is his,” he said, referring to the map. He added that a memorial service for Mr. Nargeolet will be held next week in Paris.
Rob McCallum, the founder of EYOS Expeditions, which led seven trips to the sunken liner, said the map showed no unexpected features or clues. “There was no unusual jump,” he said in an interview. The destruction of the Titan submersible, he added, “is essentially where it should be.”