A Letter From the Publisher

By Richard B. Thomas

The sea floor, an unimaginably hostile world of crushing pressure and utter darkness, remains one of the earth's last unexplored frontiers -- as well as a story that journalists cannot easily plumb. But that is changing. This week's cover story describes the adventurers and scientists -- they are sometimes one and the same -- who are using the latest mechanical marvels to delve into the oceans' secrets. TIME correspondents around the world interviewed dozens of these underwater experts, whose most fascinating discoveries have been of ships that came to grief over the centuries, from the mighty Titanic to the remnants of a 3,400-year-old sailing craft off Turkey.

The Titanic expedition set out from the territory of Boston Correspondent Joelle Attinger, and she got as close as she could to the scene of the wreck's latest exploration. In addition to conducting a face-to-face interview in Woods Hole, Mass., with Expedition Leader Robert Ballard, who found the Titanic last fall and has just returned from a second, more detailed look, she used a ship-to-shore radio to talk to him. Reports Attinger, who spoke several times with Ballard after he had surfaced from eight-hour descents: "The romance of these ventures is tangible, the excitement spontaneous. This is really a story about dreams and the people and technology that have made them come alive." Artist Ken Marschall, a Titanic historian whose images of the ship have adorned books and a record album, sought to capture that romance in his illustration for this week's cover. Says Marschall of the manned submersible Alvin, which approached the sunken liner: "It's the human eye seeing the Titanic for the first time in 74 years."

Thousands of miles away in Turkey, Rome Bureau Chief Erik Amfitheatrof borrowed flippers and a face mask from archeologists exploring a Bronze Age vessel that sank in 1400 B.C. Amfitheatrof plunged from the American research ship Virazon to meet three divers ascending from the wreck 160 ft. below. They handed him a box containing objects they had found, including gold jewelry. "My one concern while swimming," Amfitheatrof said, "was not to drop that box."

Staff Writer Jamie Murphy, who wrote the cover story, drew on his scuba- diving knowledge for this week's assignment. Murphy once dove to a depth of 180 ft. while hunting for black coral in Hawaii. That experience, he recalls, provided "an incredible feeling of entering a different world."