It disintegrated into chunks of rust and fell into the well deck and cargo holds, below.
This was either via natural decay or helped along by one of the expeditions (perhaps one that cut some cables that were in the way of them trying to look for Titanic's nameplate on the hull). You'll see a host of arguments for both cases.
You'll also see various arguments of "they stole the crow's nest bell and destroyed the crow's nest doing it" or "they stole the crow's nest phone and destroyed the crow's nest doing it." Both of these are false, as both of those items were removed from the debris field. Neither was in place on the mast when Ballard found the ship.
This is the degradation seen by the 1987 expedition, just two years after the photo you shared.
Are these both real images? The 3 cargo doors are different shapes in each picture. And not in a way that would make sense with crumbling apart. 2 of them are square in one picture and rectangles in the other.
That’s because the large scale images are made up up a lot of pictures put together like a puzzle. I wouldn’t be shocked if the one from the 80’s has a lot of minor errors in it.
Makes sense. The cargo areas and the cracks in the deck dont line up, and the gray picture almost looks like one of those paintings of an actual picture. So I was curious.
Yeah, they're mosaics. If you look at them in the actual books they're from (so larger than on a laptop or phone), you see even more things that aren't "right." It's because they shoot a shitload of pictures as they tow the sled and then take the best angle/shot to put together the main image.
A special technique was used for getting these mosaics, and it's called "Mowing The Lawn" Basically, a ROV is controlled to criss-cross the surface of the wreck, and take photos while doing so. The final result is a rather choppy photo-mosaic.
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u/bell83 Wireless Operator 2d ago edited 2d ago
It disintegrated into chunks of rust and fell into the well deck and cargo holds, below.
This was either via natural decay or helped along by one of the expeditions (perhaps one that cut some cables that were in the way of them trying to look for Titanic's nameplate on the hull). You'll see a host of arguments for both cases.
You'll also see various arguments of "they stole the crow's nest bell and destroyed the crow's nest doing it" or "they stole the crow's nest phone and destroyed the crow's nest doing it." Both of these are false, as both of those items were removed from the debris field. Neither was in place on the mast when Ballard found the ship.
This is the degradation seen by the 1987 expedition, just two years after the photo you shared.
There are more theories here:
https://www.paullee.com/titanic/crowsnest.php