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A passenger ship's promenade deck is a covered deck area where passengers can walk around during the voyage. The Titanic's forward promenade deck was enclosed. The openings in this photo originally held glass windows. The promenade deck was located below the boat deck, where the lifeboats were located.
Microbes that feed on iron create icicle-shaped rusticles. Here, Hercules retrieves an experiment package left on the Titanic's deck in 1998. The experiment package was used to help researchers determine how quickly rusticle-formation is deteriorating the Titanic's hull and other metal from the wreck.
Davits are mechanical devices used to support and lower lifeboats from the ship's deck to the water below. The Titanic had 16 davits, each capable of holding two or three lifeboats. However, each davit was equipped with only one lifeboat on the ship's first—and only—voyage.
A windlass is the gear used for raising and lowering a ship's anchors. The Titanic's two main anchors weighed 27 tons each.
This davit was located near the tip of the Titanic's bow and was used to raise and lower the ship's auxiliary anchor. The anchor was intended as a spare in case the ship lost one of her other anchors. It would be lifted out of a well in the bow, swung out over the side of the ship, and then lowered. The auxiliary anchor was never used and is still sitting on Titanic's deck.
This hatch leads into the No. 1 cargo hold. The Titanic left England carrying an astounding amount of cargo and provisions for its journey to New York, including 3,364 bags of mail, 12,000 dinner plates, 50 cases of toothpaste, 33 tons of fresh meat, 40,000 eggs, and 5,900 tons of coal to fuel the ship's coal-fired boilers.
The Titanic's main mast has fallen across the forecastle well deck. The crow's nest was once located on this mast. It was from the crow's nest that a crew member first saw the approaching iceberg and telephoned the bridge below with the warning, "Iceberg, right ahead!"
This is perhaps the most haunting image of the Titanic's bow section. Rusticles and a sea star hang from the ship's railings.
The telemotor is a hydraulic device on the ship's bridge (located on the bow) that is used to control the ship's steering (located in the stern). The Titanic's wooden wheel was once attached to this bronze telemotor. Memorial plaques and a bundle of plastic flowers have been left here by earlier expeditions and other visitors.
The crow's nest was still present on the Titanic's main mast when Dr. Ballard located the wreck in the mid-1980s. The absence of the crow's nest in the 2004 photomosaic is one sign of damage done to the wreck, most likely by careless visitors or salvagers.
The rectangular opening in these photos is the skylight in the roof of Titanic's Marconi room. In the 2004 photo, the holes and discolored areas of the roof near the skylight are likely due to submersibles landing on top of the deck. The Marconi room housed the ship's Marconi wireless telegraph, which began sending distress signals a little after midnight. Without these distress signals, which brought the ship, Carpathia, to the rescue, there might not have been any survivors of the shipwreck.

When the 2004 expedition ended, researchers were able to see how quickly the wreck site had deteriorated by comparing their data with Dr. Ballard’s database from the mid-1980s.

Click on a button to explore either the 2004 photomosaic of the Titanic's bow section or view photographs of the wreck.

Explore the Mosaic

The expedition team captured images that offer an incredible amount of detail. Much of that detail is obvious when viewing the new photomosaic of the bow section. On this screen, you can zoom in and take a closer look.

Use the + sign to zoom in, the - sign to zoom out. The button on the right resets the mosaic to its original size. You can pan using the four arrow buttons, or simply drag the image with your cursor.

Photo Gallery

The green circles are targets visited by the expedition research team as they navigated Hercules around the bow section of the Titanic. Click on the targets to see photographs taken by Hercules's high-definition cameras. Click either of the two blue circles to compare areas of the shipwreck as shown in both the 1987 and 2004 photomosaics.