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Practice #2 Using Commas in Writing

Discovering the R.M.S.Titanic

Robert Ballard is a man with a mission. A former US Naval officer, Ballard has been exploring the sea for more than 30 years. In 1984, he joined a French/US expedition to use robot boats to discover and photograph the Titanic. That expedition was a failure, but Dr.Ballard was not deterred. The next year, he went back to the scene with the Alvin, a three-person submarine, and Jason, a remote control robot. He discovered the Titanic lying on the ocean floor where it had come to rest 73 years earlier. It was in a field of debris under 3,800 meters or 12,000 feet of water.

He used Jason to explore the Titanic while he watched in the Alvin. The water is so cold and the pressure so great that no diver could survive outside of a vessel. The scene was an eerie one. The decks of the ship, once fine mahogany, had been eaten away by sea borers. While the giant funnels, smokestacks, had disappeared, a single chandelier still hung in the dining room. With Jason as his eyes, Ballard could see the massive main staircase, the purser's safe, and even the cutlery and glassware in the dining room. While Ballard tried unsuccessfully to open the safe, he removed nothing from the scene. He even left a plaque commemorating the 1,523 passengers who had lost their lives that night 73 years ago.

The following year, however, a controversial French salvage expedition retrieved dishes, jewels, currency, and other items from the scene. These were exhibited in Paris in September, 1987. There have been questions about whether artifacts should be removed from the scene. However, the investigation continues.

Ballard's research discovered that the reason the Titanic was sunk by the collision with the iceberg was the shape of the damage. Rather than one puncture in one spot, damage which would have allowed water into one flotation chamber, the actual collision caused a long, narrow scrape along the hull of the ship, allowing water into six of the 16 flotation chambers. Ballard speculates that if Captain Smith had not actually tried to turn the ship away from the iceberg and, instead, hit it head on, the damage would have been grave, but the ship might have stayed afloat. By turning the ship, Ballard says, the ship scraped along the iceberg for 35 meters, or 110 feet, and compounded the damage. In fact, later analysis of the steel used to build the Titanic confirms that the hull was overly brittle and probably broke apart at the seams in the bitter cold North Atlantic seas.

Should we raise the Titanic to make it a museum? No, the brittle steel and poor rivets would not stand the trauma of being raised. Should we leave it there and send tourist vessels to visit it? Perhaps, but the same weaknesses that made the ship fall apart are allowing it to deteriorate quickly in its deep, dark grave. Four movies have been made about the story of the Titanic and that is probably its best legacy.

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