Sinking of the RMS Titanic the hull plates. This suggests that the iron rivets along the plate seams snapped off or popped open to create narrow gaps through which water flooded. An engineer from "Titanic"s builders, Harland and Wolff, suggested this scenario at the British Wreck Commissioner's inquiry following the disaster but his view was discounted. "Titanic"s discoverer Robert Ballard has commented that the assumption that the ship had suffered a major breach was "a by-product of the mystique of the "Titanic". No one could believe that the great ship was sunk by a little sliver." Faults in the ship's hull may have been a
Wreck of the RMS Titanic over the wreck site, and the "Remora" ROV was caught in a piece of wreckage. This same year saw the discovery of the new bacteria living in the rusticles on the "Titanic", "Halomonas titanicae". Tourist and scientific visits to "Titanic" are still continuing; by April 2012, 100 years since the disaster and nearly 25 since the discovery of the wreck, around 140 people had visited. On 14 April 2012 (the 100th anniversary of the ship's sinking), the wreck of the "Titanic" became eligible for protection under the 2001 UNESCO Convention on the Protection of Underwater Cultural Heritage. In the same