On a cold April night in 1912, the magnificent new liner R.M.S. Titanic struck an iceberg and sank beneath the icy waters of the North Atlantic. The following day the words “TITANIC LOST” shocked the world. Seventy-three years later, on the morning of September 1, 1985, Dr. Robert Ballard and a joint French/American expedition located the legendary lost ship and photographed her upright on the ocean floor. The next day, headlines around the world proclaimed “TITANIC FOUND!”

In the summer of 1986, Dr. Ballard returned to the Titanic and descended two and a half miles in a tiny three-man submarine to explore the ghostly wreck. Actually landing on the deck of the ship, Ballard sent Jason Junior, his robotic “swimming eyeball,” down the Grand Staircase to “see” glass chandeliers still hanging in place, unseen for three-quarters of a century. During eleven separate descents to the Titanic, Ballard and his team explored the entire ship — including the artifact-strewn debris field and severed stern section — and photographed her in remarkable detail.

Robert Ballard’s Titanic is the compelling, first-hand account of the famed oceanographer's twelve-year quest to find the sunken liner. With the help of rare archival pictures, charts, paintings and a 25-inch “photo mosaic” of the ship, Ballard recounts the Titanic’s fateful last night and describes the moment-by-moment drama of finding and exploring the most elusive of lost ships.