Divers discover thousands of years of marine life near the Titanic

The Titanic wreck lies in two parts at the bottom of the North Atlantic Ocean, nearly 4,000 meters below the surface, but it is not alone. A sonar signal detected some 26 years ago has now revealed that there is much more to this underwater area than previously thought.

PH Nargeolet, a veteran submersible pilot of the Nautile (a small manned submersible) and diver on the Titanic, originally picked up the signal on echo sounder equipment in 1996, but its origins remain unknown.

On an expedition to the sinking of the Titanic earlier this year, Nargeolet and four other researchers went to the site previously recorded by the blip to look for the mysterious object it represented. Due to the magnitude of the blip, Nargeolet believed he was looking for another wreck – he found a rocky reef, made up of several volcanic formations, with lobsters, deep-sea fish, sponges and various species of coral that could be thousands of years old.

“It’s biologically fascinating. The animals that live there are very different from the animals that live in the abyssal ocean,” said Murray Roberts, a professor of applied marine biology and ecology at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland and one of the expedition’s researchers. 🇧🇷[Nargeolet] did a very important scientific work. He thought it was a shipwreck, and it turned out to be even more amazing than a shipwreck.”

The abyssal plain is a term used to describe the ocean floor at a water depth of 3,000 to 4,000 meters, which makes up 60% of the Earth’s surface, according to Roberts. It is believed to be a featureless, muddy seafloor without much structure. On some occasions, divers have observed rock formations in the plain. Since the recent discovery near the Titanic, Roberts now believes such features may be more common than previously thought.

The rocky areas can also help explain the distances that sponges and corals travel on the ocean floor, which has always been a mystery to scientists. Within the muddy environment where they are normally observed, there are few hard surfaces for these species to cling to in order to grow and reproduce.

“Sometimes they show up in places where we think, ‘Well, how did they get there? They don’t live long enough to get there,’” Roberts said. “But if there are more of these rocky places, these steps, than we thought, I think it could help us understand the distribution of these species across the ocean.”

The researchers are currently working on analyzing images and videos taken of the reef during the dive and intend to share their findings to improve the scientific community’s collective knowledge of marine life. Roberts also hopes to link this discovery to a broader Atlantic Ocean ecosystem project he leads called iAtlantic, which will allow for further study and protection of the fragile ecosystem within the reef.

This photo taken on April 27, 2021 shows workers arriving at the site of a still-under-construction replica of the Titanic ship in Daying County, southwest China’s Sichuan Province.

There is another sonar signal near the Titanic that Nargeolet hopes to identify on a future expedition. It was recorded in the same survey he conducted years ago, between the sinking of the Titanic and the newly discovered reef — now named Nargeolet-Fanning Ridge in honor of him and the 2022 expedition’s mission specialist Oisín Fanning. Nargeolet expects whatever it is to be even bigger than this reef.

OceanGate Expeditions and its foundation – which, along with Fanning, provided the financial support for the Nargeolet dive this year – will continue their longitudinal survey work of Titanic and surrounding areas in 2023.

“The marine life… was so beautiful. It was really unbelievable, because I never expected to see this in my life,” said Nargeolet. “I will be very happy to continue looking at the Titanic.”