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The bizarre methods that people have come up with to bring Titanic's remains to the surface

While salvaging shipwreck is difficult, it's possible, and researchers have been trying to figure out ways to bring the Titanic to the surface for decades.

BY SUNAYNA KANJILAL

PUBLISHED JUL 21, 2024

Image Source: (Original Caption) Photo shows the ill-fated luxury liner, the Titanic, sailing the ocean.. (Photo by George Rinhart/Corbis via Getty Images)

From researchers to movie fans, the RMS Titanic's tragic descent into the depths of the ocean on the moonless night of April 15, 1912, has become a captivating story for people across generations. Just four days into the ship's maiden voyage from Southampton England to New York City, the ship met an unfortunate watery end after hitting an iceberg, despite the famous "unsinkable" tag, which was heavily used to advertise the ship.

Since that time, numerous expeditions have unsuccessfully tried to use sonar to map the seabed in hopes of finding the infamous wreckage. It was only in 1985 that the wreckage was located by Jean-Louis Michel of IFREMER and Robert Ballard of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, while they were looking for two nuclear cold war submarines.

Image Source: The SS 'Titanic', leaving Belfast to start her trials, pulled by tugs, shortly before her disastrous maiden voyage of April 1912. (Photo by Topical Press Agency/Getty Images) — Image Source: The RMS 'Titanic', leaving Belfast to start her trials, pulled by tugs, shortly before her disastrous maiden voyage of April 1912. (Photo by Topical Press Agency/Getty Images)

Today, artifacts recovered from the site sit in museums such as the Titanic Museum of Orlando and the Titanic Experience in Cobh, Ireland. The wreckage is now protected by the UNESCO convention, but that hasn't stopped explorers from looking for ways to raise the massive graveyard.

One of the ways to do it for light vessels is to attach buoyancy bags underneath before inflating them to raise the wreck from the depths to the surface. For old and fragile ships, a cage is fastened around the vessel before lifting them. But all of this was too risky for the RMS Titanic lying down there for more than a century.

Over the years everything from inserting balloons into the wreckage to using ping pong balls has been considered to retrieve the ship's remains, but it's all likely to fail since the wreckage is split in two parts.

An engineer from Stamford, Connecticut came up with an idea that involved placing polyester bags into the hull and then pumping Vaseline into them which would become solid and buoyant, allowing the bags to raise the wreck to the surface in one piece.

Someone even did the math and concluded that around 180,000 tons of Vaseline would be needed to give enough buoyancy to lift the massive structure. That's a huge amount, especially when a cargo ship can only carry around 120,000 tons.

Another man named Arthur Hickey who has been after the Titanic for a long time, claimed to have a dream that inspired him to inquire about the price of liquid nitrogen, which was to be used to create an iceberg around the wreck that would then float to the surface. However, when he approached the BOC group they ruled out the idea since it would require an entire plant on top of the wreck to pump liquid nitrogen down constantly.

Although the list of the ways in which the wreck can be lifted is endless, the means to pull off such an expedition can be costly in every sense. Moreover, given that the wreck is constantly being consumed by bacteria under the water, it probably won't stand the test of time. Hence none of the plans that people have come up with can help bring back the Titanic, unless they are executed quickly.