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Titanic!
, the hero managed to patch holes in the ship’s hull and surface it with compressed air. But when an American-French expedition found
Titanic
in 1985, it proved no such plans were remotely possible. The explorers, led by oceanographer Dr. Robert Ballard and Jean-Louis Michel of the Institut Français de Recherche pour l’Exploitation de la Mer (IFRE-MER), located the ship through a systematic, high-tech search and days of careful observations. They drew a rectangle on a map of the North Atlantic containing the most likely site of
Titanic’
s wreckage, based on historical accounts of the sinking and the surface currents that night. Their surface ship, the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution research vessel
Knorr
, dragged a rig containing a video camera and powerful lights back and forth in a grid pattern inside the search box. Ballard called it “mowing the lawn.” The rig sent live images to television monitors aboard the
Knorr
.
    At 12:48 a.m., September 1, the monitors displayed metallic objects near latitude 41° 43’ N, and longitude 49° 56’ W—about 350 miles southeast of Newfoundland and beneath about 12,500 feet of water. A few minutes later, man-made objects appeared on-screen. “It’s coming in!” cried one member of the exultant crew. Another chimed in, “Wreckage!” and then the observation room erupted with whoops and shrieks. An unmistakable image of one of
Titanic’
s boilers, its identification confirmed by comparison with a 1911 photograph, appeared on-screen. Other artifacts followed.
    Titanic
no longer was lost. But it no longer resembled the ship of dreams. Its hull had broken aft of its third funnel, apparently as a result of seawater filling the forward sections first. The bow had remained mostly intact, although it had plowed deep into the mud of the ocean floor, leaving a massive darkened ring around its edges. The stern section, found later, looked like a bombed-out industrial district, with decks collapsed and steel plates peeled and torn. Shipwreck experts speculated that the bow had escaped majordamage by slowly filling with water and gliding to the ocean floor, while the stern, which broke off at the surface, likely contained pockets of air that imploded as it quickly sank. Portions of the hull and artifacts spilled during the ship’s rupturing encircled the two sections.
    Many more expeditions followed. Ballard returned in 1986 in a manned submersible to get close-up color pictures of bow, stern, and artifacts. The next year, divers working for the private company now known as RMS Titanic, Inc. began diving to the wreckage. The company made more than 100 visits through 2004 and retrieved nearly 6,000 artifacts. Many went on display, drawing millions to exhibitions worldwide.
    Other dives served as video documentaries, exploring the ship with high-tech movie cameras so audiences in theaters could share the experience vicariously. A 1990 Russian-French-American expedition made 13 dives to gather high-definition images for the IMAX movie
Titanica
. Filmmaker James Cameron financed 12 dives in 1995 to
Titanic
for his blockbuster movie of the same name. He returned in 2001 to film
Ghosts of the Abyss
, sending two miniature remotely operated vehicles, named
Jake
and
Elwood
for characters in the movie
The Blues Brothers
, into the interior.
    All told,
Titanic
expeditions have generated 1,200 hours of raw video footage. Stunning visual images of the ship touched off a new round of
Titanic
-mania. New pictures and new data prompted professional and amateur engineers and historians to try to understand what happened on the night of April 14 and predawn morning of April 15, 1912.
    One of the first forensic theories about
Titanic’
s rapid sinking blamed its hull plates. According to the “brittle steel” scenario,
Titanic’
s shell should have survived a glancing blow. Weaknesses from sloppy, hasty steel