![]() ![]() ![]() The technology aboard the Petrel takes Ballard’s early work a step further. Rather than looking for the shipwreck itself, he did something that revolutionized underwater searches: He looked for the debris field ejected from Titanic as it sank - which would be a much larger target. When Robert Ballard, a reserve naval officer and oceanographer, went looking for the Titanic in 1985, he knew side-scan sonar would not be helpful because the seafloor in that part of the North Atlantic was littered with boulders deposited in the last ice age, which would clutter the incoming data. Funded by Paul Allen, a co-founder of Microsoft who died in October and who wanted to find these ships as a way to honor his father’s military service in World War II, the ship’s state-of-the-art technology allows for faster and more efficient searches than were possible even a decade ago. ![]() The news of that discovery and the story of the team who found the wreck was published on March 13 in a feature article by Ed Caesar in The Times Magazine.Īboard a 250-foot-long research vessel called the Petrel, originally built for servicing oil fields, a group of explorers, historians, divers and submersible pilots have been combing the South Pacific for the graves of American warships like the Wasp since 2017. 14, 2019, researchers laid eyes on the Wasp for the first time in 76 years. Hit by two or possibly three torpedoes from a Japanese submarine, the crippled ship was abandoned, then torpedoed by an American destroyer to send it to the bottom, approximately 14,000 feet below. Wasp, a United States Navy aircraft carrier, slipped beneath the waves 350 miles southeast of Guadalcanal. ![]()
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