Damage to Titanic site upsets explorer

WASHINGTON -- The man who found the remains of the ocean liner Titanic nearly two decades ago has returned to the site and is lamenting the damage done by visitors and souvenir hunters.

Undersea explorer Robert Ballard discovered the wreckage of the famous vessel in 1985. He returned to the North Atlantic site this summer for the first time, using remotely controlled submersibles to get a look at the liner, which sank in 1912 after striking an iceberg.

What he found was serious damage to the ship caused by deep diving submarines that have visited the site over the years.

"We saw numerous cases where submarines had struck the Titanic . . . oval shapes where they had landed and crushed the deck," Ballard said in a phone interview last week.

Areas where submarines could not go were unchanged from his first visit, Ballard said.

"Our position is, we'd love to have you go down there, but don't touch. You don't go to the Arizona and pull pieces off of it. . . . What we want is to try to establish protocols to prolong the life of the Titanic," he said.

The battleship Arizona is preserved as a memorial at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, where it was sunk in the Japanese attack that brought the United States into World War II.

Ballard does not expect a floating memorial above the Titanic, but he would like to see people respect the site.

To that end, he is working on an international treaty designating the ship an international maritime memorial and establishing rules for visiting the site without causing damage.

Britain has signed the treaty and the State Department has agreed to it, though the matter still has to go to the Senate to be ratified, Ballard said. He hopes to get Russia, France and Japan to sign on.

Many artifacts already have been collected from the debris field surrounding the vessel, Ballard said, and as far as the ship goes, "there's nothing left to pick off from the Titanic itself."

Salvagers have taken coins, dinnerware, lamps, a compass, a ships bell, rings, cuff links, broaches and other items from the debris field, Ballard reported. The debris field now is littered with refuse, piles of chain and bags of sand used as ballast by the submarines.

Ballard details his visit in a new book, "Return to Titanic: A New Look at the World's Most Famous Lost Ship," and an article in the upcoming December issue of National Geographic magazine.

This famed ship, resting 12,500 feet deep in the North Atlantic, remains a memorial to the 1,523 people who died when it sank that chilly April day.

"The deep sea is the largest museum on Earth; there's more history in the deep sea than all the museums combined," Ballard said. "Are we going through the doors to appreciate it or to plunder it?"

"If you can't protect the Titanic, what can you protect," he said. "There are at least 1 million ships in the deep sea . . . there's got to be rules, international agreements."

On the Net: National Geographic: www.nationalgeographic.com

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