Finding History

Titanic: The Final Secret

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Image: Titanic, Scorpion, Dr. Bob Ballard, and Thresher submarine

Sunken Mysteries

When Dr. Bob Ballard found Titanic, he was actually on a top secret naval mission to analyze two navy submarines that had sunk during the Cold War. Find out background information with these facts about Titanic and Navy submarines.

Titanic?s fatal collision with an iceberg happened at 11:40 p.m. on April 14, 1912. She went under at 2:20 a.m. on April 15, 1912. The next time she was seen was 1:05 a.m. on September 1, 1985 when the submersible Argo transmitted an image of the downed liner?s boiler to the crew above.
The RMS in RMS Titanic stands for Royal Mail Steamer. That means that the ship was licensed by the Royal Mail to carry mail overseas. This designation was only issued to the fastest ships due to the time-sensitive nature of mail and therefore was a great asset to a ship.

Sonar is a technique that finds an object by bouncing sound waves off of it. But sonar can't tell a rock from a hunk of metal. Ballard's cameras delivered the clearest images the Navys ever had at that time, of even the smallest debris.
Ships in the U.S. Navy are divided into classes according to their basic design and the class bears the name of the first of its design commissioned by Congress. USS Scorpion was an SSN-585 Skipjack class submarine. USS Thresher was an SSN-593 Thresher class. After the loss of Thresher, the class was renamed for the second ship, SSN-594 Permit class.
Nuclear submarines can stay submerged for extremely long times, and in fact the length of time between surfacings is primarily dictated by the need for food and other supplies.
Because of limited capacity, every person on board a submarine is trained to operate and repair every system and piece of equipment on the ship.
On April 10, 1963, the Navy lost communication with Thresher and its 129 crew members approximately 200 miles off the coast of Cape Cod. Research concluded that Thresher, while on a test dive to her limit of about 1300 feet, suffered a power failure, sank, and imploded.
To this day, the Navy can?t say for certain why Scorpion fell below its crush depth and imploded. Surveys of the wreck, 400 miles southwest of the Azores, conclude there is no evidence the Soviets sank the sub. However, varying theories continue to generate debate over the cause of the accident.

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