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 – for the Navy. The Navy commissioned Ballard and his team to carry out a month-long expedition every year for four years, to keep "Argo / Jason" in good working condition. It agreed to Ballard's proposal to use some of the time to search for "Titanic" once the Navy's objectives had been met; the search would provide an ideal opportunity to test "Argo / Jason". In 1984 the Navy sent Ballard and "Argo" to map the wrecks of the sunken nuclear submarines USS "Thresher" and USS "Scorpion", lost in the North Atlantic at depths of up to . The expedition