For instance, the guidelines call for no holes to be cut in the ship's hull. The guidelines are just advisory, however, and are not legally enforceable.
Late in the summer of 2001, James Cameron, director of the movie Titanic, sailed to the site to film Ghosts of the Abyss, an IMAX movie that opened last April.
"Time was of the essence because the Titanic is collapsing," the filmmakers said in a news release, adding that scientists estimated that sections of the wreck would "collapse sometime within the next 20 to 30 years."
Last year, the climate of uncertainty grew as pirates lowered a robot down to the wreck, working without permission of the legal salvors.
"They were trying to recover some artifacts," said Nargeolet, the French submersible pilot. "They dove on the bow section and tried to recover the pedestal of the wheel, the only thing left in the middle of the bridge. I heard that people saw a lot of damage."
This June, using twin Russian submersibles, the NOAA dived to the wreck, taking two microbiologists (including Cullimore), two archaeologists and two agency shipwreck experts.
Larry E. Murphy, an archaeologist for the National Park Service who went on the expedition, said it was done to determine how to measure multiple processes of decay and come up with a credible estimate of the rate of deterioration.
"The sad thing," he said, "is that with all the gathering of artifacts, there's still not a reliable map that's been done and we know very little about what's going on with the site. We have anecdotal observations, but very little science."
He said the federal team made a photo mosaic of the wreck for first time since its 1985 discovery. "Now," he added, "we have a basis for comparison."
In July, private experts, including McLaren, an emeritus president of the Explorers Club in New York, used the Russian submersibles to explore the Titanic's state of decay.
David A. Bright, a team member, compared the expedition's own photos to those of earlier explorations. He found walls collapsing, structures rotting away, joints widening, tears developing in hull plates and rusticles growing vibrantly.
The Titanic, McLaren and Bright concluded, "has been losing its structural integrity at a rapid rate and she is in danger of collapsing."
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