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
Raise the Titanic! Raise the Titanic! Raise the Titanic! is a 1976 adventure novel by Clive Cussler, published in the United States by the Viking Press. It tells the story of efforts to bring the remains of the ill-fated ocean liner RMS "Titanic" to the surface of the Atlantic Ocean in order to recover a stockpile of an exotic mineral that was being carried aboard. "Raise the Titanic!" was the third published book to feature the author's protagonist, Dirk Pitt. It was the first of Cussler's novels with a prologue set long before the main story, describing an incident with consequences resolved in