Wreck of the RMS Titanic the debris field was surveyed in Robert Ballard's 1986 expedition, pairs of shoes were observed lying next to each other on the sea bed. The flesh, bones, and clothes had long since been consumed but the tannin in the shoes' leather had apparently resisted the bacteria, leaving the shoes as the only markers of where a body had once lain. Ballard has suggested that skeletons may remain deep within "Titanic"s hull, such as in the engine rooms or third-class cabins. This has been disputed by scientists, who have estimated that the bodies would have completely disappeared by the early 1940s
Wreck of the RMS Titanic "Titanic". As Harris/Grimm's unsuccessful efforts had taken more than forty days, Ballard decided that extra help would be needed. He approached the French national oceanographic agency, IFREMER, with which Woods Hole had previously collaborated. The agency had recently developed a high-resolution side-scan sonar called SAR and agreed to send a research vessel, "Le Suroît", to survey the sea bed in the area where "Titanic" was believed to lie. The idea was for the French to use the sonar to find likely targets, and then for the Americans to use "Argo" to check out the targets and hopefully confirm whether they