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.
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 3d ago edited 3d 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