2023-06-22 21:07:03
All five passengers from the Titan submersible, which had been missing since Sunday, are dead, the US Coast Guard said. Among them was Frenchman Paul-Henri Nargeolet, a Titanic specialist.
The Frenchman Paul-Henri Nargeolet, who died with the crew of the submersible Titan missing since Sunday in a visit to the wreck of the Titanic, is a former submariner who has become a specialist in deep diving and passionate regarding maritime archeology.
Originally from Haute-Savoie and now 77 years old, this seabed explorer spent the first part of his career as a naval officer.
Commander of the group of clearance divers in Cherbourg (Manche, north-west of France), he then became a submarine pilot in the Undersea Intervention Group, part of the French Navy. From there he moved on to maritime archeology, with the excavation of several wrecks, within the association of the Naval Archeology Research Group.
It rubs shoulders with the wreck of the Titanic from 1987
The real turning point in his career came in 1986 when he became responsible for the deep intervention submarines of the French Research Institute for the Exploitation of the Sea (Ifremer). A year earlier, a team led by American scientist Robert Ballard, in cooperation with Ifremer, found the wreckage of the Titanic.
As early as 1987, Paul-Henri Nargeolet saw wreckage aboard the French submarine Nautile. There followed, over the years, dozens of dives that notably enabled the recovery of several hundred objects.
The latest date back to the summer of 2021, says the submariner in a long interview published on the site of La Cité de la Mer, a museum in Cherbourg.
Searches for missing ships
“During our last dive on the front part of the Titanic, without any current which is very rare, we were able to observe for the first time parts of the wreckage from a different angle, which made it a particularly interesting,” he said.
Paul-Henri Nargeolet became in 2007 director of the research program of the company RMS Titanic/Phoenix International, which owns the wreck.
He did not confine his activities to the study of the ship, by participating in several search campaigns for missing ships, and even that, in 2010, of the Airbus A330-203 which disappeared during the Rio Paris flight.
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