An Australian woman’s dream was to explore the Titanic. It almost ended in disaster

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Emily Jateff had barely graduated as a marine archaeologist when she was selected for a 2005 submersible expedition to the Titanic – a shipwreck that had captured her imagination for years. At the time, the 7.8 metre expedition vessel was one of only five subs authorised to descend below 3000 metres.

The Sydney woman made her first descent with a pilot and another crewmate, and spent hours roving the wreck.

Maritime archaeologist Emily Jateff aboard Akademik Mystislav Keldysh, during an expedition to the Titanic in 2005.

But on the way back up, something went wrong. The rear of the submersible pitched upwards while the nose pointed down. The condensation-slick walls tilted. Their sub had been ensnared by a ghost net.

“It was momentarily terrifying,” said Jateff, now the curator of ocean science and technology at the Australian National Maritime Museum in Sydney.

Ghost nets are fishing nets abandoned by trawlers that wend through the ocean, even at 4000-metre depths. They can be kilometres long and more than large enough to entangle whales.

“They are a serious threat to navigation both above and below the water.”

Ghost nets are just one of the hazards that could have caused the Titan submersible to go missing during its descent to the Titanic wreckage on Sunday night (AEST). The Titan hasn’t regained communication with its surface ship since it disappeared with pilot Stockton Rush and four passengers on board.

While Jateff’s had a taste of how quickly these trips can turn dangerous, after a gut-wrenching few moments, the submersible came unstuck.

“Just watch the bubbles,” Jateff’s companion Mike deGruy told her. “If they are still going up, so are we.”

Jateff made three more submersible trips. They crew deployed state-of-the-art remote-controlled exploring vehicles into the wreck through a shaft where the liner’s grand staircase once was to capture groundbreaking footage and data, and scientists conducted microbiological tests. They explored parts of the wreck not seen since 1912.

Jateff’s journey was part of the Last Mysteries of the Titanic expedition led by filmmaker James Cameron. The expedition set sail from St Johns, Newfoundland – the same city OceanGate’s surface ship departed from – 370 kilometres away from the wreck.

As Jateff and her companions descended to the site, they’d watch the blue water leach to black through tiny viewport windows as they delved past the mesopelagic zone, 1000 metres down. No light reaches beyond this point.

A bag of styrofoam cups the crew strung to the outside of the submersible were crushed to one eighth of their original size as 400 atmospheres of pressure pressed around the sub (that’s 2500 kilograms of force exerted on every square inch).

“It looked surreal,” she recalled in a blog post years later. “After nothing but the sandy seafloor stretching out in front of us, all of a sudden, my tiny viewport was filled with the side of a mammoth vessel. The steel hull, reaching up above, beyond and all around us.”

The bow of the Titanic is still instantly recognisable even after so long underwater.Credit: Twitter/@AtlanticProds

Jateff’s is interested in vessels that can explore the ocean without a crew. The maritime museum just acquired a prototype autonomous surface vessel, and Jateff wants to acquire more.

“I think one of the most interesting developments in recent times is the growing use of autonomous vessels for monitoring our oceans, which is more efficient and economically sound,” she said.

“One of the main challenges facing researchers today is that only about 25 per cent of the ocean is mapped at high resolution, which means that in some areas, we still have very little idea what is down there.”

The Nippon Foundation-GEBCO Seabed 2030 Project is aiming to map the entire ocean floor at high resolution by 2030 and make the data freely available.

“The completion of this project will go a long way towards providing researchers – including maritime archaeologists – with accurate data to better understand and care for our one ocean,” Jateff said.

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