2008 Summer

Trip to the Titanic

Archaeologist and adjunct professor Michael Arbuthnot shares his underwater adventures

The claustrophobia set in when Michael Arbuthnot was about 700 feet underwater, crunched into a space barely seven feet wide with Hollywood director James Cameron. At that depth, the last traces of sunlight disappear.

Their tiny submersible descended to the ocean floor with 5,600 pounds of pressure per-square-inch crushing against it. Outside, strange creatures occasionally drifted by in the sandy abyss until out of the darkness, the giant hull of an “unsinkable” ship emerged — the Titanic.


“As I gazed upon her massive anchors and chain, watching her stern disappear into the darkness, I felt a sense of surreal time travel,” Arbuthnot said. “Here she was, a moment from the Edwardian 20th century, frozen on the bottom of the sea … located in an environment where no human can go unaided by sophisticated technology.”

A bacterial byproduct clung to the hull, making the ship look like it was melting, bluish rock. As Cameron excitedly narrated the scene – “Look! See how the telemotor remains so perfectly intact!” – Arbuthnot said little. He was too busy feeling “small before history.”

Arbuthnot, an archaeologist and Flagler College adjunct professor, often shares stories from his travels to archaeology sites around the globe with students. But the Titanic trip – which took him 12,600 feet below sea level – is probably Arbuthnot’s most exciting tale.

“People have this idea of archaeologists sitting there with a brush and toothpick,” Arbuthnot said, “but it can be exciting.”

In 2005, Cameron – who produced, wrote and directed the Academy Award-winning movie “Titanic” – recruited Arbuthnot to work on the first systematic archaeological survey of the famous sunken ship’s internal bow structure. The trip’s goal was to collect as much information as possible from the wreck before the ocean destroyed the ship’s remains; the findings were compiled for the Discovery Channel special “Last Mysteries of the Titanic.”

Arbuthnot worked with one of three remotely operated vehicles (ROVs) sent out to explore the remains of Titanic, which sunk nearly 100 years ago. He crowded into an underwater vessel with Cameron and an engineer for several 14-hour dives to get close enough to the wreckage and gather images and data from inside the ship’s bow.

More than 1,500 people died on Titanic, but Arbuthnot’s team found no bones. The ocean environment didn’t preserve the skeletons. Instead, the team found some remarkably preserved areas, including an opulent Turkish steam room complete with beautifully detailed tiles and chairs. The trip’s discoveries meant a lot to Arbuthnot, who sees archaeology as a chance to preserve cultural resources and find “potentially revolutionary” artifacts.

“Once they’re gone, they’re gone forever,” he said. “We’re capturing a moment in time. We can learn about ourselves, about the present and what to do in the future, by studying the past.”

His passion for studying remnants of the past tends to rub off on students. Alethea Geiger, who graduated from Flagler with a degree in fine art this year, said the archaeology class she took with Arbuthnot inspired her. She picked up a lot of practical advice on how to launch a career in archaeology, Geiger said, and she’s currently looking for jobs at natural history museums and researching archaeology tracks at graduate schools.

“He was one of the best professors I had,” she said, adding that her favorite part of the class was getting to inspect bones from one of Arbuthnot’s work sites. “We also had the opportunity to meet a working experimental archaeologist from Georgia … He did a wonderful job of actually allowing us to participate in the field.”

When he’s not teaching at Flagler, Arbuthnot is an archaeologist for a local company, Environmental Services Inc. He has worked on a variety of land and ship surveys, some of which uncovered new information on Native American cultures. He said archaeologists use those findings not only to reconstruct histories, but to learn how ancient disasters caused societies to collapse – and how to prevent those disasters in the future.

“Archaeologists were some of the first environmentalists,” he said. “Findings can result in practical applications and profound insights.”

For Arbuthnot, who studied philosophy as an undergraduate at the University of California at Santa Barbara, archaeology offered a unique opportunity to dig for important information and actually get a little dirty in the process.

“I wanted a career that was going to put me outdoors more, with the potential to have a discovery,” he said. “In philosophy, one of the most fundamental questions is the meaning of life – what does it mean to be human? And anthropology seeks to answer those questions.”

© 2008 Flagler Magazine.