Word: underseas
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Watching on television, they vicariously joined the undersea craft Alvin and Jason Jr. ("J.J.") as they toured the wreckage of the luxury liner, wandering across the decks past corroded bollards, peering into the officers' quarters and through rust-curtained portholes. Views of the railings where doomed passengers and crew members stood evoked images of the moonless night 74 years ago when the great ship slipped beneath the waves...
While the exploration of the legendary Titanic captured the imagination of the world, it was but one of many undersea forays now in progress. Even as J.J. roamed the corridors of the great ship, diving teams from Cape Cod, Mass., to the South Seas, wearing scuba tanks, masks and flippers, were peering at decaying wrecks on the sea floor. At depths ranging from dozens to hundreds of feet, they probed and photographed the remnants of rotting hulls and carefully marked the location of scattered debris like cannonballs, silver bars or shattered pottery. Returning to the surface, they often brought with...
...incentives for undersea exploration extend beyond the historical and archaeological benefits. High-tech fortune hunters are locating sunken treasure ships and recovering their precious cargo. New remote-controlled vehicles are prowling the ocean depths, some dropping listening devices and scouting out potential hiding places for missile-firing submarines. Others are seeking mineral deposits and clues to the movement of the earth's tectonic plates, and charting the two-thirds of the earth's surface that until recently has been largely inaccessible...
...used it to excavate a vessel at the bottom of the Mediterranean near the island of Grand Congloue. "That opened the door to underwater exploration for the modern day," says Wilbur Garrett, editor of National Geographic, the venerable publication of the National Geographic Society, which has since financed many undersea missions by Cousteau and others. In 1959 Cousteau invented the first small submersible, a battery-powered diving saucer propelled by jets of water that could safely carry a two-person crew to a depth...
...disaster, not exploration, spurred development of more versatile undersea vessels like Alvin and J.J. In 1963 the Navy's brand-new nuclear-powered submarine Thresher lost power and sank 220 miles east of Cape Cod with 129 on board. It took 1 1/2 years before a Navy search team, aboard the bathyscaphe Trieste II, finally located the sub resting 8,400 ft. down...