Wreck of the RMS Titanic but have been consumed by other organisms. "Titanic" sank in 1912, when she collided with an iceberg during her maiden voyage. Numerous expeditions tried using sonar to map the sea bed in the hope of finding it, but were unsuccessful. In 1985, the wreck was finally located by a joint French–American expedition led by Jean-Louis Michel of IFREMER and Robert Ballard of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. The wreck has been the focus of intense interest and has been visited by numerous expeditions. Controversial salvage operations have recovered thousands of items, which have been conserved and put on public display.
Wreck of the RMS Titanic will have devoured fifty per cent of the hull within 200 years. Since "Titanic's" wreck was discovered in 1985, radical changes have been observed in the marine ecosystem around the ship. The 1996 expedition recorded 75 per cent more brittle stars and sea cucumbers than Ballard's 1985 expedition, while crinoids and sea squirts had taken root all over the sea bed. Red krill had appeared and an unknown organism had built numerous nests across the seabed from black pebbles. The amount of rusticles on the ship had increased greatly. Curiously, the same thing had happened over about the same timescale