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The naval officer who first discovered the wreckage of the Titanic has revealed one of the most haunting memories from his expedition.
Robert Ballard, a retired navy officer and underwater archaeologist discovered the remains of the RMS Titanic, which sunk in the Atlantic Ocean.
The biggest ship in the world at the time of its maiden voyage from Southampton, England to New York City, it hit an iceberg and sank about 435 miles south of St. John's, Newfoundland on April 15, 1912.
Of the 2,200 passengers and crew on board, more than 1,500 died in the accident.
It wasn't until many years later that the ship's remains were discovered in 1985.
In a resurfaced clip posted to TikTok, the marine expert told how he was surprised by his reaction to not only seeing the wreckage of the ship but the shoes of the victims.
"Everything down there is gigantic and you can get quickly sidetracked on big things, but to me the most compelling images, are images like this," Ballard said during a presentation where he showed photos of shoes and boots at the bottom of the ocean.
He explained: "Bodies came raining down all across the Titanic in a debris field.
"Animals quickly found them and removed their flesh. And the deep sea at that temperature is saturated in calcium carbonate, which is what your bones are made out of, and the skeleton will actually dissolve in the deep oceans, which takes about five years."
In a chilling explanation, Ballard described "what's left behind" of the dead is what "used to be attached to the body."
"[Which] are the shoes because of the tannin acid that goes into the leathering process. So everywhere around the Titanic are pairs of shoes," he said.
But for Ballard a "pretty powerful" image was the shoes of a "mother with her daughter that died together in a second class cabin."
The Titanic has been in the news recently because of the fate of a submersible vessel carrying five passengers who had been attempting to see the wreckage of the ship.
OceanGate lost its CEO and four other passengers this week when its submersible, Titan, suffered a "catastrophic implosion," the U.S. Coast Guard announced on Thursday.
The small capsule descended into the depths off the Atlantic coast on Sunday morning on a trip to view the Titanic wreckage but lost contact with surface ship Polar Prince an hour and 45 minutes into the journey.
The wreckage sits at around 12,500 feet below sea level—far lower than most submersibles can travel and under pressure 400 times greater than that on the surface. According to OceanGate, the Titan was only one of five vessels in the world able to journey that far down.
Those who lost their lives on the Titan were Paul-Henry Nargeolet, a former French navy diver, British adventurer Hamish Harding, OceanGate CEO Stockton Rush and British-Pakistani businessman Shahzada Dawood and his son, Suleman.
About the writer
Shannon Power is a Greek-Australian reporter, but now calls London home. They have worked as across three continents in print, ... Read more