The wreck of the Titanic sits in two parts at the bottom of the North Atlantic Ocean, slowly decaying nearly 4,000 meters (13,000 feet) below the surface, but it’s not alone. A sonar blip detected around 26 years ago has now revealed there’s much more to this underwater area than previously thought.
P.H. Nargeolet, a veteran Nautile submersible pilot and Titanic diver, originally picked up the blip on echo sounding equipment in 1996, but its origins have remained unknown.
In an expedition to the Titanic shipwreck earlier this year, Nargeolet and four other researchers went to the blip’s previously recorded location to search for the mysterious object it represented. Due to the blip’s magnitude, Nargeolet had believed he was looking for another shipwreck — he instead found a rocky reef, made up of various volcanic formations, and thriving with lobsters, deep-sea fish, sponges and several species of coral that could be thousands of years old.
“It is biologically fascinating. The animals that live there are very different to the animals that are found otherwise living in the abyssal ocean,” said Murray Roberts, a professor of applied marine biology and ecology at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland and one of the researchers on the expedition. “(Nargeolet) did a really important piece of scientific work. He thought it was a shipwreck, and it turned out, in my mind, even more amazing than a shipwreck.”
