Wreck of the RMS Titanic intact and undamaged dresser behind it. Robert Ballard has suggested that areas within the ship or buried under debris, where scavengers may not have been able to reach, may still contain human remains. According to Charles Pellegrino, who dived on "Titanic" in 2001, a finger bone encircled by the partial remains of a wedding ring was found concreted to the bottom of a soup tureen that was retrieved from the debris field. It was returned to the sea bed on the next dive. The longest-lasting inhabitants of "Titanic" are likely to be bacteria and archaea which have colonized the metal
Wreck of the RMS Titanic US and the UK. Only a few days after Ballard's discovery of the wreck, Jack Grimm – the author of the unsuccessful early 1980s attempts to find "Titanic" – claimed ownership of it on the grounds that he had allegedly been the first to find it. He announced that he intended to begin salvaging the wreck. He said that he "[couldn't] see them just lie there and be absorbed by the ocean floor. What possible harm can [salvage] do to this mass of twisted steel?" Titanic Ventures Inc., a Connecticut-based consortium, co-sponsored a survey and salvage operation in 1987 with