Our team is excited to be in St. John’s, Newfoundland, preparing for our third Titanic Expedition. It is almost hard to believe that we will be returning to the wreck for the third year in a row, and we feel lucky to have the opportunity to study and honor this historic site. Our first two expeditions taught us a lot about operating in the wild North Atlantic. It’s a beautiful and ever-changing environment that always offers an unforgettable adventure
Our crew has diligently prepared our equipment and updated our checklists for the 2023 Titanic Expedition, but we always expect new challenges. We’re starting our Titanic Expedition earlier than usual and have been tracking all the social media posts showing icebergs and sea ice in the area.
Lucky for us that we have chartered an icebreaker as our expedition vessel! We are excited to work with the crew of Miawpukek Horizon’s vessel Polar Prince. We have collaborated with their team to reconfigure systems to work smoothly with our dive operations. The Polar Prince, a well-known fixture in Canadian maritime history, first sailed with the Canadian Coast Guard as a light icebreaker named Sir Humphrey Gilbert. It made an incredible voyage around Canada for the country’s 150 birthday. Miawpukek Horizon has recently deployed it as training vessel for its cadet training program and the Students on Ice program. We are proud that our expedition will become part of this storied vessel’s history.
Our goals for the expedition remain the same: To study the Titanic wreck site in as much detail as possible, to honor its place in history, and to gather as much data as possible about the ecosystems in the deep ocean.
Dr. Steve W. Ross is again leading our science team as Chief Scientist. Our efforts to study the wreck began in 2021, and the year-over-year-over-year analysis will contribute to the scientific community’s understanding not only of the Titanic, but of the deep ocean.
We’re excited to continue working with eDNAtec to study the Titanic wreck site in unprecedented detail. Environmental DNA analysis is a powerful tool that can extract a tremendous amount of information from a small sample of water or air. In our case, we collect small water samples that eDNAtec can study to identify the life forms which left their DNA in the water. We began this work last year, and although final results are still pending, we can share that the science team is excited by what we found. Returning to the wreck to collect even more data will help us develop a more robust data set to further study the wreck site’s ecology.
We are eager to meet the new group of Mission Specialists who will join us onboard. Our Mission Specialists make these Titanic Expeditions possible, and we are truly inspired by their sense of adventure, amazing life experiences, and willingness to jump right in. We are lucky to have them as part of our crew.
We will try our best to update this blog throughout the expedition, but please be patient if there are gaps. We are grateful for your interest and excited to share our work and discoveries, but we will be primarily focused on the operational tasks at hand. Please follow our journey on social media, sign up for our newsletter, and check this page for updates.
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