Wreck of the RMS Titanic

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RMS Titanic wreck
Bow of the RMS Titanic, photographed in June 2004
Event	Shipwreck of RMS Titanic
Cause	Struck an iceberg while on maiden voyage from Southampton to New York City
Location	370 miles south-southeast of Newfoundland, North Atlantic Ocean
Operator	White Star Line (now merged with Cunard)

The wreck of the RMS Titanic is located about 370 miles (600 km) south-southeast of the coast of Newfoundland, lying at a depth of about 12,500 feet (3,800 m). Over the years since 1912, when the liner hit an iceberg and sank during her maiden voyage, many impractical, expensive and often physically impossible schemes have been put forward to raise the wreck from its resting place. They have included ideas such as filling the wreck with ping-pong balls, injecting it with 180,000 tons of Vaseline, or using half a million tons of liquid nitrogen to turn it into a giant iceberg that would float back to the surface.
Until 1985, the location of the wreck was unknown. Numerous expeditions tried using sonar to map the sea bed in the hope of spotting the wreck, but failed due to a combination of bad weather, technological difficulties and poor search strategy. The wreck was finally located, 13.2 miles (21.2 km) from the inaccurate position transmitted by Titanic's crew while the ship was sinking, by a joint French-American expedition led by Jean-Louis Michel of IFREMER and Robert Ballard of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. The key to its discovery was an innovative remotely controlled deep-sea vehicle called Argo, which could be towed above the sea bed while its cameras transmitted pictures back to a mother ship.
The wreck lies in two main pieces about a third of a mile (600 m) apart. The bow is still largely recognizable, in spite of its deterioration and the damage it suffered hitting the sea floor, and has a great deal of preserved interiors. The stern is completely ruined due to the damage it suffered while sinking 12,000 feet (3,700 m) and hitting the ocean floor, and is now just a heap of twisted metal, which may explain why it has barely been explored during expeditions to the Titanic wreck. A substantial section of the middle of the ship broke apart and is scattered in chunks across the sea bed. A debris field covering about 5 by 3 miles (8.0 km × 4.8 km) around the wreck contains hundreds of thousands of items spilled from ship as she sank, ranging from passengers' personal effects to machinery, furniture, utensils and coal, as well as fragments of the ship herself. The bodies of the passengers and crew once also lay in the debris field, but have since been entirely consumed by sea creatures, leaving only their shoes lying together in the mud.
Titanic's wreck has been the focus of intense interest since its discovery and has been visited by numerous expeditions, including salvage operations which have controversially recovered thousands of items which have been conserved and put on public display. The wreckage is too fragile to be raised because its condition has deteriorated in the century it has spent on the sea bottom, and the deterioration has increased since its discovery. Many species of marine animals have made Titanic their home, such as rattail fish, spider crabs and brittle starfishes. The Titanic also plays host to great communities of metal-eating bacteria, which as they consume the ship have created rusticles covering most of the hull. The bacteria are slowly devouring Titanic and will gradually reduce her to a spot of rust on the ocean floor with only the remaining scraps of her hull intermingled with her more durable fittings, like the propellers, the Telemotor and the Capstans, which can resist attack by microbes.