The dives to the wreck would take place in the MIR deep submersibles MIR 1 & MIR 2 piloted by Anatoly Sagalevitch head of the MIR program and Evgeny ‘Genya’ Cherniev regarded as one of the world’s foremost deep submersible pilots. The wreck site of the Titanic lies almost 400 nautical miles south east of Newfoundland and about 1000 miles east of Boston. The journey out to the wreck takes in excess of some 36 hours, which is spent with the Russians discussing the wreck site as well as taking a look into their own personal scientific research. The 2003 expedition was successful in that each dive achieved its objective missions and that each was carried out in what can be described as a more than acceptable weather period. During our stay on the site the Keldysh would employ the vessels four point dynamic thrusters to position exactly over the site for over a week and a half while the MIR program continued with its dives. While on site, visibility often dropped dramatically due to thick fog which stayed with us virtually until we left the wreck. It has to be said that a strong presence is felt just being on the spot in the North Atlantic where history’s most famous shipwreck was lost. The English divers had been to hundreds of different wreck sites but all agreed the presence of Titanic is felt like no other, a special place to be.

Images from the wreck by Lori Johnston left; bow rail, center; window, right; bow anchor

The wreck today lies on the North Atlantic seabed in a depth of 3784m, 12,487ft or simply 2.5 miles down, she lies upright although broken in two distinct sections that lay a distance of 600m/2000ft apart. Although broken the wreck has several stress points particularly around the bow/bridge section of the site and certain expansion joints are now being forced apart. Since 1996 scientists of this expedition have been trying to determine just how fast the ship is corroding, the hull for example of Titanic is slowly being consumed by rust. By studying etchings from the rusticle's the scientists have been able to study complex communities of organisms growing in the iron rich shells of the rusticle's. It is estimated that the bacterial communities may have already consumed as much as half of the wrecks bow plating. As the ship continues to lose iron to the rusticle's the scientists are able to predict how long the wreck will take to biologically implode. which also means that no rusticle's will be taken for scientific purposes. Therefore the scientists and archaeologists on the project will make only observations as well as recovering tests that have periodically been placed on the site during the expedition and before.

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©Leigh Bishop