Schemes to locate the wreck persisted. During the 1970’s, an alliance between Walt Disney Productions and National Geographic magazine made plans for a film based on the sinking and subsequent discovery of the wreck. The project never got off the ground. In England, Seawise & Titanic Salvage LTD demonstrated considerable technical expertise and hope of finding the wreck but was unable to obtain funding. It wasn’t until the summer of 1980 that a full-scale expedition was mounted to locate the wreck of RMS Titanic. American millionaire Jack Grimm tried three separate times to locate Titanic. The first attempt was in August of 1980. Grimm teamed up with scientists from the Scripps Institute of Oceanography in California and the Lamont-Doherty Geological Observatory, part of New York’s Columbia University. Throughout the course of the expeditions, Grimm’s team located numerous potential targets but none were identified as Titanic. On his second trip out, Grimm was certain that one object located by sonar was a massive propeller, but none of the scientists on his team would substantiate his claim. A third search provided no additional evidence of the wreck’s location.

     In 1985, the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute in Massachusetts teamed up with the French Institute for Research and Exploration of the Seas (IFREMER) in an effort to locate the wreck using new side-scan high resolution sonar that could sweep 1,000 yard wide sections of the sea floor. Under the leadership of Woods Hole oceanographer Dr. Robert Ballard and Jean-Louis Michel from IMFEMER, the French research vessel Le Suroit carried out the first phase of the expedition between July 9th and August 7thm, 1985. Taking into account the areas searched by Jack Grimm’s team five years earlier as well as factors that could have affected the accuracy of Fourth Officer Boxhall’s calculations on the night of the sinking, Le Suroit’s search was concentrated on a 150 square mile area to the south and east of 41.46 N and 50.14 W. Bad weather intervened and the expedition was halted.

     Two weeks later, on August 22nd, Ballard and Michel transferred their team to the US Naval research vessel Knoor. This time, the search was conducted using Argo, a towed platform consisting not only of side-scan sonar equipment but also highly sophisticated real time video cameras which transmitted high resolution images to Knoor via a fiber optic cable. The first task for Argo to complete was the examination and elimination of Jack Grimm’s sonar targets and "propeller". Once this task was completed, the team moved on to areas not already covered by previous expeditions. For days, Argo was towed back and forth across the seabed. With nothing to show for their efforts, the team began to admit to themselves that Titanic may indeed have been buried by the Grand Banks earthquake in 1929. With sprits low, the crew struggled to stay awake in the early hours of September 1st. Then the sonar began to return some unusual echoes. A number of obviously man-made objects began to appear on their screens. Dr. Ballard was summoned to the control room. He came into the room just as a massive round object appeared on the video screen. It was one of Titanic’s boilers! The Ship of Dreams had been found.

     As Dr. Ballard and his team celebrated their discovery of the ship that had been lost for nearly 75 years, their jubilation mixed bitterly with sorrow. As they wrapped up their initial pass over the wreck, the local time was 2:00AM. Nearly the same time Titanic had sank. They were in the same spot. A quiet moment was shared on Knoor’s fantail as the team remembered the lives lost. It was a sobering moment for Doctor Ballard, who was at the culmination of a ten year quest to locate the Ship of Dreams. Now that she had been found, he knew his journey was far from over.

     Over the course of the next few days, Dr. Ballard and his team flew Argo over the wreck to determine it’s condition and to obtain high quality images. Finding that all of the funnels were gone and that the rigging was down allowed the team to bring Argo down to only twelve feet over Titanic’s decks. The ship lay upright on a gently sloping stretch of the ocean floor overlooking a small canyon at a depth of nearly 13,000 feet; two and a half miles down! The initial images showed that Titanic’s wreck consisted of two major pieces. The intact bow section, consisting of approximately 470 feet of the forward half of the ship, lay pointing north, approximately 2,000 feet away from the shattered stern, which faces south. Immediately there seemed to be an answer to the question that had gone unanswered for nearly a century; whether or not she had broken in two before sinking.

     Dr. Ballard’s team could not locate the enormous gash thought to have been caused by the iceberg. The bow was buried 60 feet deep in the muddy bottom, hiding the portion of the hull thought to be damaged. No human remains were found either. The muddy bottom is so acidic that flesh and even bones are quickly broken down. Only pairs of leather shoes found side by side remain as indications of where a body once fell. The ghostly images sent up from the ocean floor did, however, remind everyone that this was a grave site. The haunting images of empty lifeboat davits watered even the steeliest of eyes. Luggage, personal items and furniture littered the debris field strewn out between the two main sections of Titanic, along with machinery and thousands of tons of coal.

     Dr. Ballard and his team pulled Argo up for the last time on September 4th and headed back to Woods Hole in Massachusetts. By now word had spread across the globe; "Titanic Found at Bottom of Ocean!". When Knoor entered Nantucket Sound, the team was treated to a hero’s welcome. Boats of every imaginable size surrounded them, helicopters buzzed overhead and thousands of people cheered them on from the shore. If Titanic’s loss had triggered an outpouring of grief and sorrow, her discovery had certainly had the opposite effect. It seemed that the entire world suddenly remembered the great ship that had been all but forgotten. Titanic was once again in the headlines..