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MARTIN BOWEN
OCEANOGRAPHER
In the summer of 1986, Bowen was the fourth human and the first photographer to see the lost Titanic in person, flying over the ship’s lonely decks during six 2.5 mile dives in the submersible Alvin. He is the fist Remotely Operated Vehicle (ROV) pilot in the world to successfully penetrate a shipwreck with an ROV, operating from inside a manned submersible at extraordinary depths, and the first ROV pilot to perform archaeological excavation via remote control, retrieving delicate artifacts from a deep-water ancient Roman shipwreck off the coast of Sicily.
During his dives to Titanic, Alvin landed on the ship’s ruined boat deck from which Bowen deployed the ROV, Jason Jr., to peek inside windows, to look into the promenade deck, and to descend the famous Grand Staircase. Bowen’s color images of Titanic, taken with cameras mounted on Jason Jr., were published in National Geographic’s 1986 article covering the discovery and documentation of the sunken luxury liner.
In his more than twenty years of underwater exploration for National Geographic Magazine, Woods Hole Oceanographic and the JASON Foundation for Education, Bowen has piloted ROVs to explore other famous shipwrecks, among which are the liner Lusitania, the Nazi Battleship Bismarck, and United States Navy battleships sunk during the WW II Battle of Guadalcanal.
Bowen has given more than seventy presentations of his adventures to audiences throughout the United States and in Canada, Mexico, and the Caribbean. his focus is often on Titanic, but he also gives presentations focusing on his twenty years of shipwreck exploration. The title of the Titanic presentation is “Eyewitness Discovery: The First Expeditions to the Sunken Luxury Liner RMS Titanic,” which includes 50-60 minutes of imagery and narration. Some background is provided about the ship’s sinking along with methods used by explorers during its discovery and mapping. The audience experiences a day’s dive in Alvin to the Titanic wreck. Part of the presentation also provides the audience with the differences, both psychological and technical, between coastal SCUBA diving and deep-sea wreck diving at depths to 2-1/2 miles.
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MARTIN’S INFO
PROGRAMS/TOPICS
- Eyewitness Discovery: The First Expeditions to the Sunken Luxury Liner RMS Titanic