The Nadir has already started on her way north to St. John’s, and tonight, the Ocean Voyager is setting out due west for Boston. If we’re lucky, we’ll get there without crossing paths with Hurricane Danielle.

The fifth Titanic research and recovery expedition’s over, two days ahead of schedule—but with the weather against us, there’s not much else that we can do.

On this Titanic expedition, in fact, George Tulloch says, the weather was a bigger factor than in any year since 1987. "We lost dive days due to bad weather during both parts of the expedition, and we had to constantly readjust our priorities," he adds.

Two major pieces of the Titanic—the Big Piece and the port-side gangway door—have been raised from the seabed and will travel with the public exhibitions.

For the first time in history, a live fiber-optic television link was established at the deep bottom of the ocean, permitting viewers to watch, real-time, the exploration of the wreck by a manned submersible.

The stern section was completely mapped photographically to create a detailed photomosaic of that complex portion of the wreck.

New debris fields were discovered, including an area west of the stern section that contains a large amount of passenger baggage.

And a scientific team has been on-site investigating the microbiology of the wreck, samples of the Titanic’s steel and rivets, the "third piece" of the hull, as well bends and cracking in the bow section of the wreck. They’re building on the knowledge gained in 1994 and ’96 and will continue their analyses in the coming months.

What’s most apparent and troubling to George, though, at the end of the ’98 expedition is the rapid deterioration of the wreck.

"The corrosion seems to be advancing at such a fast rate," he says, "that it’s plain that the ship’s physical structure does not have much time left. That means that we may have less time than we thought to finish the investigations that we’ve started."

And there is still a tremendous amount to learn, adds P.H. Nargeolet.

"With the photomosaicing we’ve done," he says, "we can now, for the first time, fully see the stern section and begin to understand the huge forces that destroyed it. It’s important that we come back and do that kind of imaging of the bow, because none of the drawings and models we now have are completely accurate. There’s still a lot for us to explore and study."

For now, from the North Atlantic, somewhere south of the Grand Banks, we’re signing off.

Susan Wels and Matt Tulloch
Titanic ’98 Expedition


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