35 years ago, Titanic shipwreck discovered on ocean floor

More than 1,500 of the estimated 2,224 passengers perished. Many were wealthy and from affluent backgrounds.

Capt. Edward Smith also went down with the ship.

Tragically, the ship only had enough lifeboats for roughly half the people on board.

But about 700 survivors were brought aboard the RMS Carpathia about two hours after the sinking.

On Sept. 1, 1985, 73 years after the epic disaster, a robotic submarine expedition led by Jean-Louis Michel and Robert Ballard came upon the rusted shipwreck 12,415 feet below the surface.

In photos, the ghost ship appeared spooky and ancient — covered in a thick layer of orange-brown rust; steel panels from portions of the vessel were shredded like paper and covered in sea deposits, organisms and barnacles.

The explorers were surprised to find the vessel split in two, with the bow mostly intact and the stern crumpled by the impact on the sea floor. Inside both was an archaeological gold mine.

A miles-long debris field also contained thousands of items that had cascaded from the wreckage during its descent to the ocean floor. Many artifacts have been recovered and are displayed in museums around the world.

Years later, it was revealed that Michel’s and Ballard’s historic find came as a result of a top-secret expedition by the U.S. Navy to find the wreckage of two nuclear submarines, according to National Geographic.

The oceanographers quickly located the U.S.S. Thresher and U.S.S. Scorpion, then took advantage of the 12 remaining days of the mission to search for Titanic, which Ballard speculated would be between the two submarines.

Ballard only received tacit approval for the mission to find Titanic, “but the Navy never expected me to find the Titanic, and so when that happened, they got really nervous because of the publicity,” Ballard told National Geographic in 2008. “But people were so focused on the legend of the Titanic they never connected the dots.”