Spooky footage of RMS Titanic eerily resting 4,000 metres under the North Atlantic Ocean was released to coincide with a 25-year anniversary re-release of James Cameron's film Titanic.
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The footage, filmed in July 1986 after the wreck was discovered, became available to the public this week.
Ocean archeologists had spent years searching for Titanic's wreck, but the instincts of Dr Robert Ballard tracked the ship to it's final resting place.
In 1985, as far as the world knew, the US navy launched an expedition to find the Titanic.
"In actual fact, they were looking for two missing US naval submarines," Titanic enthusiast Carlo Ritchie told ACM.
"It was going to be quite a big diplomatic incident if the US navy revealed that they had lost them," he said.
Then they found the Titanic.
How was the Titanic found?
In 1985, Dr Ballard led the US navy team to find lost nuclear submarines, USS Scorpion and USS Thresher, doing ten sweeps of the ocean floor off the coast of Newfoundland.
"But Ballard had an ulterior motive, he really wanted to find the Titanic," Mr Ritchie said.
"They let him have one more sweep to find the ship," he said.
Dr Ballard was using debris to track wreckages, which had worked for him in the past.
He became a notable underwater archeologist after finding ancient Greek ships following trails of discarded amphorae on shipping routes.
"He looked for things that would have sunk quickly and gone straight down," Mr Ritchie said.
In the early morning hours of September 1, 1985, Dr Ballard and his team came across RMS Titanic's boiler, lying on the ocean floor.
"Sure enough, a little further on they found the bow of the Titanic," the comedian said.
As they describe it, it just appeared out of the gloom
- Carlo Ritchie
The exploration team took haunting photos of the ghostly ships, the first time RMS Titanic had been seen since sinking.
On July 12, 1986, Dr Ballard returned to film the wreck and perform a detailed search.
The Titanic was "eerily" intact when the US navy first photographed her, but has degraded in the years since through looting and and human exploration.
"In this film there's some amazing things we can't see, because they've disappeared now, sadly," Mr Ritchie said.
"The search found a diary in the wreckage field, a couple hundred metres from the ship, that was written in pencil and still legible," he said.
Why does this disaster fascinate us?
Comedian and author of an upcoming book on the shipwreck, Mr Ritchie remembers travelling to Sydney, from his childhood home in regional NSW, to see a scale replica of the Titanic displayed at the Queen Victoria Building.
"That's how popular it was around the country, this is before the film even came out," he said.
As a child, Mr Ritchie learned about another mysterious ship that watched idly as Titanic sank, and felt compelled to find out more.
"No matter how much you know about the Titanic it always feels like you're just scratching the surface," he said.
Mr Ritchie is one of two hosts from Radio New Zealand's podcast "Did Titanic sink?" that tackles some of the mysteries that remain around the unlikely disaster.
When asked what he would do with time to explore the wreck, he said: "I want to go and check out boiler room six".
"There's a lot of debate of whether the bulkhead gave way, I'd just like to go and find that out," Mr Ritchie said.
This would answer Mr Ritchie's questions about the strength and integrity of the ship's hull when it set out on its maiden voyage.
"And it would be nice to go down that old grand staircase, get a sense of the vastness of the ship," he said.
Records of the disaster appear in media spanning the Atlantic, making the process of tracking witness accounts an arduous one.
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"Many stories were just told to local newspapers in Ireland, for example, and never told anywhere else," Mr Ritchie said.
"This is why James Cameron should be commended for the film, just imagine how hard it would have been to do all that research without the internet," he said.
"There are snippets of witness accounts in the movie that were clearly taken from the inquiry in New York 1912," he said.
The US inquiry was digitised in the past ten years, meaning James Cameron would have pored through handwritten archives.
Digitising records means tiny snippets of articles written around the time are now available to pore over, which is why Mr Ritchie believes James Cameron has more to say.
"Now that we have this access, you constantly find these treasure troves," he said.
Anna Houlahan
Reach out with news or updates to anna.houlahan@austcommunitymedia.com.au
Reach out with news or updates to anna.houlahan@austcommunitymedia.com.au
