The RMS Titanic, one of the most famous shipwrecks in the world, has captured the attention of researchers for decades. Despite extensive exploration of the ship and its surroundings, new information continues to surface. In 2022, a group of divers made a remarkable discovery near the wreckage that had been noted 26 years prior but had never been investigated until now.

The sinking of the RMS Titanic in 1912 off the coast of Newfoundland, Canada, initially left the precise location of the wreck a mystery. It wasn’t until 1985 that Jean-Louis Michel and Robert Ballard located the ship. Since then, numerous expeditions have visited the wreck, but it wasn’t until a recent dive that an unexpected discovery was made.

During a previous expedition, PH Nargeolet, a submarine pilot and diver, recorded an anomaly on sonar that remained unexplained for 26 years. In 2022, an expedition funded by the OceanGate Foundation set out to explore the area where the blip had appeared. The team discovered a deepwater rocky reef made up of volcanic formations and coral that could be thousands of years old. The reef is home to a variety of different lobsters, fish, and sponges and is located at a staggering depth of 2,900 meters.

According to Murray Roberts, one of the researchers involved in the expedition, the reef is biologically fascinating, as the animals that live there are different from those found elsewhere in the abyssal ocean. Nargeolet’s discovery has proven to be even more remarkable than a shipwreck.

The team is currently analyzing the images and videos from the dive and plans to share them with the scientific community. Nargeolet hopes to embark on another expedition in the future to investigate a secondary blip near Titanic, indicating the presence of something even larger.