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 not stick to its proclaimed "hands-off" policy when it managed to demolish "Titanic"s crow's nest in the course of retrieving the bell. Its predecessor Titanic Ventures agreed with IFREMER that it would not sell any of the artefacts but would put them on public display, for which it could charge an entry fee. Tulloch's approach has undoubtedly resulted in outcomes that would not have been possible otherwise. In 1991, he presented Edith Brown Haisman, a 96-year-old survivor of the disaster, with her father's pocket watch which had been retrieved from the sea bed. She had last seen it on 15