Timeline of United States discoveries four days into the ship's maiden voyage, "Titanic" struck an iceberg and sank two hours and forty minutes later, early on April 15, 1912. The sinking resulted in the deaths of 1,517 of the 2,223 people on board, making it one of the deadliest peacetime maritime disasters in history. After nearly 74 years of being lost at sea on the bottom of the ocean floor, a joint Franco-American expedition led by American oceanographer Dr. Robert D. Ballard, discovered the wreckage of the RMS "Titanic" two miles (3 km) beneath the waves of the North Atlantic on September 1, 1985. Ballard
Wreck of the RMS Titanic than liquid water, would float to the surface and could be towed to shore. The BOC Group calculated that this would require half a million tons of liquid nitrogen to be pumped down to the sea bed. In his 1976 thriller "Raise the Titanic!", author Clive Cussler's hero Dirk Pitt repairs the holes in "Titanic"s hull, pumps it full of compressed air and succeeds in making it "leap out of the waves like a modern submarine blowing its ballast tanks", a scene depicted on the posters of the subsequent film of the book. Although this was an "artistically stimulating" highlight