imagine that you are with Robert Ballard in his expedition to find the titanic.write a report describing the expedition in about 150 words.
Answers
At last I am deep down the sea with Robert Ballard by my side, and we are exploring the wreckage of the famous Titanic that has been a legend of times.
What a chilling experience to see the rubbles of the ship, the story of which I had heard since childhood.
There is certain calmness around the atmosphere almost 12000 feet under water.
Explanation:
IT WASN’T A DARK AND STORMY NIGHT. DREARY, MAYBE, BUT THE PACIFIC WATERS OF THE ATLANTIC WERE NOTHING SHORT of serene. On April 14 and 15, 1912, a peaceful evening turned into a perilous fight for survival for the people who sailed on the Titanic. Yet, the band played on. Tragically, most of the passengers and crew, including the captain, did not survive the night after the “unsinkable” ship hit an iceberg and sank to its final resting place in Davy Jones’ locker at the bottom of the ocean. The chairman of the White Star Line, J. Bruce Ismay, did survive, which drew senatorial inquiries about why he, too, did not go down with the ship; after all, a tragic tale needs a villain as much as it needs a hero.
It would take more than seven decades before the ship would be discovered by Dr. Robert Ballard and his crew. With only 12 days to find the famed vessel as a negotiated side project to the real mission, which was to explore two wrecked nuclear submarines, Ballard and his team located the Titanic 2-1/2 miles deep and roughly 370 miles from the Canadian island of Newfoundland. Ballard is a professor of oceanography at the University of Rhode Island and a world-renowned nautical explorer who has also found the battleship Bismarck, the USS Yorktown among many other discoveries.
As Ballard explains, when the sea is calm much like the night the Titanic sank, he’s at his most cautious because it’s easy to let your guard down—and that’s when mistakes, accidents and near-misses occur. It’s an important lesson not only for deep-sea explorers but also for companies trying to keep workers safe or operations working smoothly. Ballard has had his share of near-misses over a nearly 60-year career, but he takes pride in saying his crews have always come back home safe and sound.
Although technology has advanced dramatically since the Titanic’s maiden and only voyage, there are still lessons to be learned about safety. Whether it’s seemingly obvious things—at least from a modern-day perspective—like having enough lifeboats for all passengers and crew or perhaps less-apparent teachings about trusting technology even when instincts have previously served you well, the Titanic tales are textbook examples of where things could go wrong.
When I shared some of the old Titanic schematics with Narendepal Marwaha, Sphera’s principal solutions architect, he had some questions, such as: Did the makers of the Titanic perform any type of quality risk assessment? He noted that the Failure Mode, Effects and Criticality Analysis (FMECA) developed by the U.S. military came about much later in 1949. Although there are many theories, at least one Canadian engineer, Roy Brander, thinks they did not take risk seriously enough. He wrote in an essay titled “The Titanic Disaster: An Enduring Example of Money Management vs. Risk Management”: “What gets far less comment is that most of the problems all came from a larger, systemic problem: the owners and operators of steamships had for five decades taken larger and larger risks to save money— risks to which they had methodically blinded themselves. The Titanic disaster suddenly ripped away the blindfolds and changed dozens of attitudes, practices and standards almost literally overnight.” Even though Ballard’s name will always be associated with locating the Titanic, today, he says he does not spend much time thinking about the infamous ship—although he did get a message from a person trying to acquire Titanic artifacts during our talk.
He also doesn’t take risks he doesn’t have to. He developed what he calls “telepresence” in the early ’80s—robotic technology that can “fool my mind” into thinking he or anyone using it is at the bottom of the ocean when they’re not. It’s much safer that way, and it eliminates the need to spend hours going down to the bottom of the ocean and then back up again on a submersible.