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 extreme pressure would have compressed the bodies into gelatinous lumps. (In fact, this was incorrect. Whale falls, a phenomenon not discovered until 1987 – coincidentally, by the same submersible used for the first manned expedition to "Titanic" the year before – demonstrate that water-filled corpses, in this case cetaceans, can sink to the bottom essentially intact. The high pressure and cold temperature of the water would have prevented significant quantities of gas forming during decomposition, preventing the bodies of "Titanic" victims from rising back to the surface.) In later years, numerous proposals were put forward to salvage "Titanic". However, all