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 the boilers are still presumably located in the bow section. As Titanic broke apart, many objects and pieces of hull were scattered across the sea bed. There are two debris fields in the vicinity of the wreck, each between long, trailing in a south-westerly direction from the bow and stern. They cover an area of about . Most of the debris is concentrated near the stern section of "Titanic". It consists of thousands of objects from the interior of the ship, ranging from tons of coal spilled from ruptured bunkers to suitcases, clothes, corked wine bottles (many still intact despite