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 the ship with the aid of the Alcoa Corporation's deep sea salvage vessel "Seaprobe". This was essentially a drillship with sonar equipment and cameras attached to the end of the drilling pipe. It could lift objects from the seabed using a remote-controlled mechanical claw. The expedition ended in failure when the drilling pipe broke, sending of pipe and $600,000 worth of electronics plunging to the sea bed. In 1978, The Walt Disney Company and "National Geographic" magazine considered mounting a joint expedition to find "Titanic", using the aluminium submersible Aluminaut. "Titanic" would have been well within the submersible's depth limits,