This story appeared in the September/October 2020 issue as part of Discover magazine’s 40th anniversary coverage. We hope you’ll subscribe to Discover and help support our next 40 years of delivering science that matters.
From the October 1980 Issue
The voice on the ship-to-shore phone sounded excited. “We think we’ve found the Titanic!” Mike Harris, leader of a much-publicized expedition that had been plowing the Atlantic off the Newfoundland coast since July [1980], was searching for the storied liner that sank on its maiden voyage in 1912. Harris and his crew had good reason for optimism. They carried $250,000 worth of advanced sonar equipment, specially designed under the supervision of Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Geological Observatory. They could not miss.
But they did. Late in August the researchers docked in Boston, driven home by bad weather and short supplies — and worse, admitting failure. What the sonar equipment had found was not the Titanic, but a ledge in a deep-water canyon.
The story as it appeared in the October 1980 issue of Discover.
Still, there was some hope. Fred N. Spiess, director of the Marine Physical Laboratory at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, thinks that the crew must have been close to its objective. Sonar readings showed several promising targets. If one of these is the Titanic, says Spiess, it is “probably either broken up or partially buried. It is highly likely that the wreck is intermingled with geological features.”
A new expedition is scheduled for sometime next summer. Provided the weather does not interfere again, the crew will investigate the target area with a magnetometer (which serves as a metal detector) and with television cameras lowered into the depths. If the ship can be pinpointed, a crew will descend in a research submarine to examine it more closely.
