Titanic divers find long-sought statue amid signs of accelerating ship decay

There was just one photo taken of her in her final resting place.

In 1986, an explorer captured an image of “Diana of Versailles,” a 2-foot-tall bronze statue of the Roman goddess, lying in the debris of the RMS Titanic, more than 12,000 feet deep in the Atlantic Ocean. Diana’s exact location was hard to pinpoint from that photo, and the site of the shipwreck was still shrouded in secrecy, so explorers who might have seen her over the years didn’t disclose where she was.

Until now. On their latest expedition, researchers with RMS Titanic Inc., the Georgia-based company with the sole rights to salvage from the wreck, rediscovered Diana’s precise location and photographed the statue, which once stood in the ship’s first class lounge. The images are among more than 2 million captured on the expedition this summer, the first since 2010. The expedition also revealed that a section of railing from the Titanic’s bow had fallen to the seafloor, a change that researchers say probably happened over the last two years.

It’s the clearest view yet of the ship’s decaying wreckage, made possible by new technology. James Penca, an RMS Titanic Inc. researcher who took part in the expedition, said the changes were inevitable, describing them as an indication that parts of the wreck are “returning to nature every day.”

“She’s aging like a grandparent that you just love, and you don’t want to leave you,” Penca said.

This summer’s expedition marked RMS Titanic Inc.’s ninth since it started dives to document and recover from the wreck in 1987. The company, whose underwater research director Paul-Henri Nargeolet was killed when the Titan submersible imploded in June 2023, has faced backlash and legal challenges in recent years over its recovery of artifacts from the shipwreck, in particular from the Marconi room. RMS Titanic Inc. had intended to collect artifacts on the latest expedition but changed those plans after the death of Nargeolet, who would have led the trip, the Associated Press reported.

No artifacts were salvaged, but a team of about 50 people spent nearly three weeks taking millions of photos of the debris. The cameras and equipment they used, Penca said, “makes everything from 2010 look like child’s play.”

The team’s to-do list was long.

They planned to scan the wreckage so they could later study what had changed about it over the last 14 years and make note of artifacts for potential future recovery. But at times the expedition’s support ship was nearby where they thought the statue might be, so Penca took the chance to search for it.

He was guided by the 1986 photo, taken by Robert Ballard, the oceanographer who first discovered the shipwreck on an expedition the year before, Penca said. While preparing for the latest expedition, he also reviewed old RMS Titanic Inc. footage of Diana from a previous trip when she had been seen but not photographed. (He did not disclose the year of that previous footage, so as not to jeopardize the potential future recovery of the statue.)

That footage gave Penca a rough area to search.

But after multiple failed attempts, the odds of spotting a bronze statue that blended in with the seafloor seemed low. There was also a chance that Diana was gone - whether she’d somehow been destroyed, moved somewhere else along the ocean floor or been completely covered by sand, making her invisible to the expedition’s cameras.

Penca likened the search for the statue to looking for a needle in a haystack - only worse because in this case, most of the haystacks weren’t visible.

Scouting through pitch-black waters, researchers could only see what their cameras captured on their monitor, and the expedition’s ship had to pass directly over objects for them to be visible.

“There’s no room for error,” Penca said.

The breakthrough came on the last day of the expedition. Penca and the team had about 20 minutes to try searching one more time.

They huddled around the monitor, hoping for a glimpse of Diana as the ship inched forward at a speed of about half a knot. When she came into view, even Penca, who had prepared for the moment, almost missed it.

The ship had approached at an angle, and the statue wasn’t showing upright the way he’d seen it on the old footage. But as it started to fill up more and more of the screen, Penca recognized its bronze lines and contours.

“When she appeared, she could have been anything, honestly,” he said. “Then suddenly you realize, no, that’s a face.”

They took the first photographs of the statue in nearly 40 years.

Though Diana was rediscovered, in the same spot and seemingly still in one piece, the expedition found other signs that the shipwreck is deteriorating.

On July 29, the expedition team saw that a part of the railing on the Titanic’s bow - the fictional version of which is famously associated with the “I’m flying” scene in James Cameron’s 1997 film - was missing. A 15-foot section of it had fallen to the seafloor directly below the bow, which had been intact for decades, RMS Titanic Inc. found.

Among the changing silhouette and debris field, Penca said Diana is an example of the benefit in preserving the shipwreck’s artifacts.

While Diana was on the Titanic, she stayed in the ship’s first class lounge, where only some passengers could see her, he said. And though RMS Titanic Inc. has not yet publicly confirmed whether the statue will be recovered on a future expedition, Penca said if it were to be salvaged, the statue could be for all to appreciate for the first time.

“To let her be a survivor of the Titanic disaster would be invaluable,” he said.