This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
Oceanography spends most of its working life on questions that never make a headline: how a current moves, how deep a basin runs, what lives at a given depth and pressure. Once in a while the same tools point at something the wider public already cares about, and the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution has two such moments on its record, decades apart.
The first, on September 1, 1985, was the identification of the wreck of RMS Titanic, found by a joint French-American expedition that paired Woods Hole's Robert Ballard with Jean-Louis Michel, working off the coast of Newfoundland. The ship had been sought for seventy years; finding it required deep-ocean survey capability that simply had not existed when it sank. The second, in 2011, was different in method but similar in kind: a Woods Hole team used autonomous underwater vehicles and sidescan sonar to locate debris from Air France Flight 447, an aircraft rather than a ship, lost in the mid-Atlantic in conditions no surface search could resolve.
What connects the two is not the subject, a passenger liner in one case and an airliner in the other, but the instrument set: research vessels, submersibles like Alvin, and remotely operated survey technology built for exactly one kind of problem, finding something small in an ocean that has no interest in giving it back.