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 – 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