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ENTERTAINMENT: Ballard revisits `Titanic' wreck

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  • ENTERTAINMENT: Ballard revisits `Titanic' wreck

    New Straits Times, Malaysia
    July 10 2004

    ENTERTAINMENT: Ballard revisits `Titanic' wreck
    Faridul Anwar Farinordin


    IN the 1997 Academy Award-winning movie Titanic, directed by James
    Cameron, a fictional underwater expedition led by Brock Lovett
    (played by Bill Paxton) probed the wreck to look for a precious
    pendant called the Heart of the Ocean.

    Believe it or not, this actually reflects the situation today. Since
    the wreck of the Titanic was first discovered by Dr Robert Ballard in
    1985 after sinking 3,600 metres into the Atlantic Ocean in 1912, its
    watery grave has been visited by people with questionable intentions.


    "People have gone down and got married there. Treasure hunters have
    been going there and tearing it apart with their equipment. They use
    submersibles, land on the the wreck's deck and bump things down. It's
    like a circus unfolding when it should be a memorial," said Ballard
    in a recent phone interview.

    It has been estimated that as many as 8,000 artifacts may have been
    ransacked from the liner - everything from porcelain and plates to a
    part of its hull.

    His increasing concern over the future of the wreck prompted Ballard
    to make a bittersweet return to the Titanic - this time, to determine
    the factors hastening the deterioration of the wreck and lobby for
    international co-operation towards protecting the site from further
    desecration.

    A documentary of this 32-member expedition called Return To Titanic
    will be aired on the National Geographic Channel (Astro Channel 52)
    at 9pm tomorrow. There will be never-seen-before footage of the wreck
    - inside the passenger cabins, suites and dining room.

    "This time, we focus on the human aspect of the tragedy. We hope to
    touch people's hearts and raise awareness that this is a special ship
    and deserves more respect. The footages are very moving - we show
    where the bodies landed... but we didn't touch anything," he said.
    The images, said Ballard, a professor of oceanography at the
    University of Rhode Island in the United States and director of its
    Institute for Archaeological Oceanography, tell many heart-wrenching
    stories.

    "We saw shoes which could have belonged to a mother and her daughter.
    Next to them was a mirror and a comb. Immediately you can imagine
    that the mother was probably combing her daughter's hair when the
    tragedy struck. The images are so powerful, as if the ship is
    speaking to us."

    The expedition arrived at the site in June on board the National
    Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) research ship Ronald H.
    Brown. It was funded by the National Geographic Society, Mystic
    Aquarium & Institute for Exploration (MA/IFE), NOAA, Partisan
    Pictures, the JASON Foundation for Education and the University of
    Rhode Island.

    As the person who discovered the wreck, Ballard feels a strong sense
    of responsibility towards its preservation. "Before 1985, I had no
    attachment to the ship. I was an engineer and a scientist. Even when
    I discovered the wreck, I saw it as a quest, a feat just like
    reaching the peak of Mount Everest.

    "It was only later that I became more attached to her (Titanic) and
    feel that she is special in so many ways. She is to me what Everest
    is to Edmund Hillary (the first man to conquer Mount Everest), who
    urged people not to turn it into a junkyard," he said.

    An international treaty was recently signed by the US and Britain to
    protect the site from further damage. "Hopefully France and Russia
    will join in the future," he said, adding "at the same time, we plan
    to carry out preservation work on the ship using modern technology
    such as underwater robots which can be employed to clean and repaint
    the ship." Born on June 30, 1942 in Wichita, Kansas, Ballard said he
    grew up wanting to be Captain Nemo from the Jules Verne classic
    fiction 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea.

    Naturally, this adventurer has been nicknamed anything from Nemo and
    "oceanography's answer to Indiana Jones" to "underwater cowboy" ("I
    actually view the ocean as a Wide West!" he said with a laugh).

    Ballard's other discoveries include the underwater hydrothermal vents
    which shed new light on the origins of life (1977), two ancient
    Phoenician ships - the oldest ship wrecks ever found in deep water
    (1999) - and four 1,500-year-old wooden ships in the Black Sea
    (2000), which suggested evidence of a great flood and ultimately
    supported the biblical story of Noah's Ark. An Armenian newspaper
    reported that Ballard is interested in locating Noah's Ark on top of
    Mount Ararat in Turkey, but he claimed it was just a rumour.

    "I am more interested in finding evidence of civilisation before the
    great flood." Also an author of 18 best-selling books including The
    Lost Ships of Guadalcanal, The Eternal Darkness, Graveyards of the
    Pacific and an autobiography Explorations, he received the National
    Geography Society's prestigious Hubbard medal in 1996 for his
    accomplishments in the world of underwater explorations.

    With the Titanic, he said "she continues to fascinate me because she
    is still there. She landed on the seabed in such a way that the mud
    was pushed in front of her as if she's still going to New York City.

    "She is an amazingly frozen piece of history, like the pyramids of
    the deep. Of course there are the mysteries, the grandeur of the
    `unsinkable' liner, the horror of the disaster and the human stories
    of the passengers - the band members who kept playing as she was
    sinking, the captain who chose to go down with her and a boy who
    turned 17 and refused to board the life boat because he just turned
    into a man."

    Will he visit the Titanic again soon? "Perhaps in another 20 years,"
    he said.
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