It may not be a $500 million golden hoard, but underwater archaeologists are nevertheless excited about finding what they believe are traces of the five ships that British privateer Henry Morgan lost off the coast of Panama in 1671.

The discovery was made at the mouth of Panama's Chagres River, near another underwater site where six iron cannons were found. Taken together, the evidence suggests that the three-century-old story of Captain Morgan's lost fleet is finally near its conclusion.

The story begins with Morgan, a Welsh sea captain who was given the British crown's official sanction to prey on Spanish sea trade. Some would call Morgan a pirate, others a buccaneer, but "privateer" is the more charitable term.

In 1671, Morgan aimed to weaken Spain's control of the Caribbean by sacking Panama City, and the first step was to capture Castillo de San Lorenzo, a Spanish fort on the cliff overlooking the entrance to the Chagres River. That river served as the only water passageway between the Caribbean and the capital.

Morgan and his pirates of the Caribbean took over the fort and went on to overwhelm the city's defenders. But in the process, he lost his flagship and four other ships to the rough seas and shallow reef surrounding the fort.

From there on, the story takes some dark twists and turns. Morgan had to move on to Panama City, abandoning the sinking ships. When the British buccaneers finally took over the city, they discovered that Spanish authorities had moved much of their treasure out to sea, beyond their reach. That made Morgan's men angry. Their mistreatment of the local citizenry in the wake of the "Sack of Panama" added to Morgan's disreputable image.

By the time he died in 1688, Morgan was seen as one of the most bloodthirsty (and most successful) pirates in the Americas. His exploits inspired enough pirate tales to fill a dead man's chest, including the Errol Flynn movie "Captain Blood" and the James Bond novel "Live and Let Die."

Any riches that may have been on Morgan's ships are thought to be long gone, thanks to treasure hunters who have plucked gold coins and other booty from the shallow waters of the Lajas Reef. But a team of U.S. archaeologists has been working to locate Morgan's ships and help the Panamanian government preserve the remaining artifacts.

'The story is the treasure'
"To us, the ship is the treasure — the story is the treasure," said Fritz Hanselman, an archaeologist with the River Systems Institute and the Center for Archaeological Studies at Texas State University. "And you don't have a much better story than Captain Henry Morgan's Sack of Panama City and the loss of his five ships."

Captain Morgan / Chris Bickford

A team of underwater archaeologists study the wreckage of a ship they believe to be part of Captain Henry Morgan's lost fleet.  The dive team discovered part of the starboard side of a 17th-century wooden ship hull and a series of unopened cargo boxes and chests encrusted in coral.

Volunteers from the National Park Service's Submerged Resources Center and the NOAA/UNC-W Aquarius Reef Base are working alongside Hanselman and other archaeologists and divers from Texas State University.

They knew they were on the right track last year when they discovered the 17th-century cannons. The experts widened their search, using a magnetometer that could pick up the signatures of objects buried beneath the sand and mud on the river bottom. Eventually, divers came upon a 52-by-22-foot section from the starboard side of a wooden ship's hull, along with unopened cargo boxes and chests encrusted in coral.

"We got really excited," Hanselman said in a video recounting the find.

Bert Ho, a survey archaeologist at the National Park Service, said the story behind the shipwrecks is being uncovered slowly through a series of dives. "Each dive tells us a little bit more, each archaeological drawing, each measurement — it all adds up," he said. "It's telling us the story of the wreck, the origin of the wreck, and hopefully the name of the wreck."

Captain Morgan / Chris Bickford

Bert Ho, an underwater project survey archaeologist with the National Park Service's Submerged Resources Center, based in Denver, maps the shipwreck with drawings using synthetic calque paper and plastic lead pencils. 

Yo ho ho and a bottle of rum
The extended search has been supported by a grant from the makers of Captain Morgan Rum, which was named after the 17th-century privateer.

"Captain Henry Morgan was a natural-born leader with a sense of adventure and an industrious spirit that the brand embraces today,” Tom Herbst, brand director for Captain Morgan USA, said in a statement. "When the opportunity arose for us to help make this discovery mission possible, it was a natural fit for us to get involved. The artifacts uncovered during this mission will help bring Henry Morgan and his adventures to life in a way never thought possible."

Herbst's company may win a share of the publicity for its role in the search for Captain Morgan's fleet, but it won't get any of the booty: Any artifacts excavated by the dive team belong the Panamanian government, to be preserved and displayed by the Patronato Panama Viejo.

More pirate lore:

• Artifacts reveal Blackbeard's terror tactics
• Blackbeard's anchor found off N.C. coast
• 10 shipwrecks that capture the imagination
• 12 pirate flicks worth digging up
• Yo ho ho: 10 pirate islands

Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page or following @b0yle on Twitter. You can also add me to your Google+ circle, and check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.

Sukree Sukplang / Reuters

An official from Thailand's Food and Drug Administration takes a sample from a shipment of frozen fish imported from Japan to test for possible radiation contamination at a customs station in Bangkok today.

Experts say that fish and other marine species shouldn't be as affected by Japan's nuclear crisis as species on land, in part because of differences in the ways radiation is dispersed.

But that doesn't mean authorities can ease up on monitoring the sea and its bounty for contamination. To the contrary: Inspectors around the world are keeping a close eye on food imports from Japan, and some countries have ordered special inspections or even outright bans on fish coming from areas near the plant.

Twenty days after Japan's earthquake and tsunami touched off a breakdown and partial meltdown at the Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear complex, some radiation experts are still struggling to get an accurate read on the situation.

"My basic feeling is that they're going to come to grips with this, and at the end of the day, it's not going to be as bad as people fear," said Florida State University oceanographer William Burnett, an expert on the environmental effects of radioactivity. "Having said that, trying to follow this story has been difficult. I see almost no real data."

The most reliable measurements have been coming from the International Atomic Energy's daily updates on the situation, said Andrew Maidment, a professor of radiology and chief of the physics section at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania. So get ready for some real data.

The latest fish radiation readings are above background levels, but still nowhere near the safety limits. The highest radiation reading for fish from the Japanese port of Choshi was 3 becquerels per kilogram of cesium-137 — far below Japan's limit of 500 becquerels per kilogram, or Bq/kg.

"This confirms what scientists including myself have been saying: First of all, the water will dilute this, and the uptake will therefore be lower than it would be for a terrestrial animal," Maidment told me. "The greater the volume of water, the higher the dilution, and the lower the impact."

When radioactive fallout is dispersed on land, it collects on what is essentially a two-dimensional carpet of vegetation, to be ingested later by livestock or humans. But when the fallout reaches the sea, it's dispersed in a much deeper three-dimensional space.

Maidment said this phenomenon was seen clearly in the wake of the 1986 Chernobyl disaster, which still ranks as more of an environmental catastrophe than Fukushima: Wild boars that were tested within a 30-kilometer radius of the Chernobyl site registered 470,000 Bq/kg of cesium-137, while freshwater perch showed concentrations of 4,000 Bq/kg. Eight years later, the levels were reduced to 5,000 Bq/kg for the boars, and 200 Bq/kg for the perch. Even those levels are unpalatably high, but they illustrate Maidment's main points: Marine life tends to absorb less radiation, and contamination levels go down over time.

Yardsticks for radiation
Let's take a moment to talk about the radiation standards: When we're talking about the absorbed dose for humans, that tends to be expressed in terms of millisieverts. For example, the typical annual radiation dose from natural sources amounts to roughly 3 millisieverts.

But when we're talking about the radioactivity contained in various substances, the standard measure is becquerels per kilogram or per liter. The safety standards vary according to what type of radioisotope we're talking about, the type of substance we're talking about, and the type of person who might come in contact with that substance. That's because there's a wide range of variation in the uptake of radioisotopes and their effects on the body.

Here are the safety limits set by Japan's Food Safety Commission and reported by Bloomberg:

• Iodine-131: 300 Bq/kg for drinking water, milk and dairy products. 2,000 Bq/kg for vegetables except for root vegetables and tubers.
• Radioactive cesium: 200 Bq/kg for drinking water, milk and dairy products. 500 Bq/kg for vegetables, grains, meat, eggs and fish.
• Uranium: 20 Bq/kg for infant foods, drinking water, milk and dairy products, 100 Bq/kg for vegetables, grains, meat, eggs and fish.
• Alpha-emitting nuclides of plutonium and transuranic elements: 1 Bq/kg for infant foods, drinking water, milk and dairy products. 10 Bq/kg for vegetables, grains, meat, eggs and fish.

Materials exceeding 100 Bq/kg should not be used as the basis for powdered infant milk formula.

Close to the Fukushima plant, the radiation levels are alarming: The IAEA said samples of seawater collected 330 meters east of the nuclear complex's discharge point showed iodine-131 concentrations of 74,000 becquerels per liter, roughly equivalent to Bq/kg. The cesium levels were 12,000 Bq/kg for cesium-137 and another 12,000 Bq/kg for cesium-134. But those levels drop sharply with distance, due to the dispersion factor.

Radioactive iodine-131 is a huge concern for people living around the Fukushima plant, because that can be quickly taken up into the thyroid and pose a significant cancer risk. What's more, iodine is taken up readily by seaweed, which is a popular food item in Japan. Elevated (but still safe) levels of radioactive iodine have been detected in seaweed as far away as Vancouver, and in milk samples from Spokane, Wash. (The reading for the milk was 0.8 picocuries per liter, or roughly 0.03 Bq/kg.)

The flip side is that iodine-131 has a relatively short half-life of eight days, so as time passes, the iodine risk should drop significantly for fish as well as for people.

Cesium-137 has a longer half-life (30 years), so it poses a longer-lived threat. The fish tests suggest that the cesium radiation levels are just one-tenth of the iodine levels, Maidment said.

Stay focused on the fish
Authorities will have to be extra-vigilant about watching radiation levels from Fukushima for a long time — on the ground, in the air and at sea, said Edwin Lyman, a senior staff scientist at the Union of Concerned Scientists, an activist group.

"Even dilute levels of contamination can be enhanced in certain marine life, you know, just like mercury concentrates in large fish, like tuna," he told reporters during a briefing on Monday. "Also, plants like seaweed are known to concentrate certain isotopes, and so are certain types of shellfish. But I would think certainly in the fishing industry in the region, they're most likely going to have to take measures to inspect their catches, and I guess the primary responsibility for that will have to be with the Japanese to inspect and interdict any contaminated seafood."

Maidment agrees that more monitoring will be needed. He also suspects that shellfish living on the seabed around Fukushima might face more contamination than the fish that just happen to migrate through the seas near the stricken plant. But he says "it's too early to draw conclusions," and he emphasizes that the general public needs to put the radiation issue in perspective.

For example, suppose that your drinking water contained 100 becquerels per liter, which is basically 100 Bq/kg. "If that water constituted 10 percent of your dietary intake of food, by weight, and you consumed that exclusively per year, you would increase your background radiation by about 20 percent," Maidment said. "I can double my background radiation just by moving from Philadelphia to Denver. So these are levels of radiation that most of us are not aware of."

I'm betting that you're more aware of the radiation issue than you were 20 days ago, and that you have some thoughts you'd like to share. Feel free to weigh in with your comments below.

Update for 12:55 a.m. ET March 31: One of my Facebook friends, Lynda Williams (the Physics Chanteuse), points out that I have not actually defined what a becquerel is. One becquerel is a unit of radioactivity that's equal to one nuclear decay per second. Here's the way she put it: "It is one atom of a radioactive isotope decaying and emitting radioactive decay. So 5,000 Bq/kg means that 10,000 atoms are decaying per second and shooting off a particle per second in one kilogram. So if the pig has a mass of 100 kilograms, we are talking about a whole body exposure of — do the math, 500,000 particles shooting through its body every second. The 'data' means more if you explain what it really means." Thanks, Lynda!

More angles on radiation:

• Seattle physicists detect radioactivity, fear it'll wreck experiment
• Japanese evacuees' new woe: Radiation prejudice
• World Blog: Tokyo fishmonger fears more radiation leaks
• Cosmic Log recap on the disaster in Japan
• Msnbc.com's special report on the disaster

Join the Cosmic Log community by clicking the "like" button on our Facebook page or by following msnbc.com science editor Alan Boyle as b0yle on Twitter. To learn more about my book on Pluto and the search for planets, check out the website for "The Case for Pluto." 

Virgin

Virgin's Necker Nymph can go to a depth of 130 feet, but the Virgin Group's billionaire founder, Richard Branson, is targeting deeper depths in a new venture.

British billionaire Richard Branson’s Virgin Group is signaling that the time has come for its long-discussed deep-sea exploration and tourism venture.

Advance word comes in the form of an invitation to a Los Angeles press event on April 5, during which a "major new initiative and challenge" will be announced. "The Virgin brand has reached many places — the seven continents of the earth, up into the jet stream and soon, even into space. There is only one frontier left," the Virgin Group's invitation reads.

It doesn't take much sleuthing to figure out the general topic. For one thing, once you rule out Earth's land mass, the atmosphere and outer space, the oceans are the only things left. Also, Branson has been talking about a venture called "Virgin Oceanic" (or "Virgin Aquatic") for a couple of years now.

Branson unveiled one part of his underwater ambitions last year, in the form of the "Necker Nymph." That's a a prototype submersible vehicle that's part of a $113,000 weeklong tour package available on Necker Island, the billionaire's vacation spot in the British Virgin Islands. (It's $25,000 for the sub ride, but another $88,000 for the resort stay). The craft was reportedly built at a cost of $670,000 (£415,000).

But that's just the beginning: When Branson discussed Virgin Oceanic with Time back in 2009, he said the venture would send pressurized submarines to depths of 35,000 feet:

"The oceans need exploring — we know nothing about what's going on under 25,000 feet. I have an island called Necker Island, and 15 miles from there is the deepest place in the whole of the Atlantic, the Puerto Rican Trench. It's quite likely that we'll set up a scientific and exploration center on Necker to send out expeditions to explore that trench and other trenches in the world."

Branson also discussed the idea in a WatchMojo video recorded at McGill University. "Besides discovering new species, charting the trenches and finding treasure, we may even find the lost city of Atlantis," he said.

A few other hints worth noting: VirginOceanic.com has been registered by the Virgin folks and is currently password-protected. AlwaysOn, an agency that has done design work for Virgin in the past, has created a Virgin Oceanic logo as well as some visual concepts for a deep-diving submarine. And Virgin's invitation promises that "eminent scientists" will be in on the L.A. press conference next month.

One eminent scientist, University of Washington oceanographer John Delaney, says he's not familiar with Branson or Virgin Oceanic. But he's in favor of any venture that will increase the public's awareness of the oceans as the world's most complex and crucial set of ecosystems. "The real intellectual power, the real emotional power, is in the recognition that we depend on something we don't understand," he told me today.

Delaney has been working for years on a different approach to marine exploration, based on the convergence of telepresence technologies. Just last month, a construction team began the first installation phase of the Ocean Observatories Initiative's Regional Scale Nodes, a network of fiber-optic cables that could eventually send terabytes of data from high-resolution cameras and other sensors under the sea.

"We can only take hundreds of people to the deep ocean, but we can bring the ocean to billions of people," he said.

Delaney has been in deep-sea submersibles plenty of times, and says it's a fantastic experience. But he hopes Virgin Oceanic can add enough scientific and educational context to turn deep-sea observation into a paradigm-shifting phenomenon. "My fantasy isn't to go to these places physically — but to occupy, in a telepresence fashion, entire volumes of this planetary life support system," he said.

Stay tuned in the days ahead for more about Branson's latest adventure, and about Earth's deep-sea frontier.

More on scientific frontiers:

• Scientists buy suborbital space trips
• Space tourism poised to blast off in two years
• Submersible robots explore the ocean's depths
• Scientists finish their first census of the sea

Join the Cosmic Log community by clicking the "like" button on our Facebook page or by following msnbc.com science editor Alan Boyle as b0yle on Twitter. To learn more about Alan Boyle's book on Pluto and the search for planets, check out the website for "The Case for Pluto."

 Scientists wrapped up their first global census of sea life today, documenting an underwater world that turns out to be livelier and more connected than they thought it would be when they began the project 10 years ago.

The raw numbers behind the $650 million Census of Marine Life are impressive enough: Almost 30 million observations by 2,700 scientists from more than 80 nations spent 9,000 days at sea, producing 2,600 academic papers and documenting 120,000 species for a freely available online database.

Australian marine ecologist Ian Poiner, who chairs the project's steering committee, said the results will serve as a "global baseline" for assessing the state of the ocean's species over the decades to come. "That's not only something that wasn't available in 2000," he told me from London, where the census' final results were shared with the world today. "Many said it was too big a challenge and could not be done."

Kevin Raskoff / Monterey Peninsula College

A new species of hydromedusa, Bathykorus bouilloni, is common below depths of 3,300 feet. Hundreds of Bathykorus bouilloni were observed by a remotely operated vehicle in the Arctic, showing that a new species can be common in a habitat. The species has earned the nickname "Darth Vader jellyfish." Can you see why? Click through our slideshow of weird and wonderful species from the Census of Marine Life.

Scientists are already looking beyond the numbers to flesh out their picture of ocean health. What they found was surprising, said Fred Grassle, director emeritus of Rutgers University's Institute for Marine and Coastal Sciences and Poiner's predecessor as steering committee chair.

"To understand the ocean, you really have to deal with the diversity of species, because the greatest diversity on the planet is in the ocean," he told me. "The majority of that diversity is in the deep parts of the ocean, which have really only begun to be explored by the census."

Poiner said the census showed that life in the oceans is richer than expected, "even in the places some suggested may not have had a richness of life." The thousands upon thousands of species are more connected than expected as well. For example, the "snow" of nutrients that drift down from the ocean's higher levels into the depths play an important role in sustaining deep-sea diversity.

That diversity is under threat in regions ranging from the Mediterranean to the oil-hit Gulf of Mexico, as pointed out in research from the census published two months ago. In some areas of the ocean, up to 90 percent of the species have declined, due to overfishing, pollution and climate change and other ecosystem upsets, Poiner said.

Kevin Raskoff / Monterey Peninsula College

This bizarre new copepod, Ceratonotus steiningeri, was first discovered more than three miles deep in the Angola Basin in 2006. Within a year it was also collected in the southeastern Atlantic and the central Pacific Ocean. Scientists are puzzled about how this tiny animal achieved such widespread distribution, and how it avoided detection for so long. Click through our

"Changes have occurred much earlier than we thought," Poiner told me. "In the few cases where intervention to support recovery has happened, we've found that although change occurs quickly, recovery takes much longer."

Poiner said the census suggests that "a different sort of management is required," based on protecting whole ecosystems rather than individual species.

He and his colleagues are just starting to think about how to follow up on what they've discovered over the past decade. "After 10 years of intensive work, our focus to date has been on ensuring the success of this first census, ensuring that we do have this baseline," he said. "And it's truly been a major accomplishment. But we also have this process to be thinking about what's next."

The process begins this week with a series of meetings in London and is to culminate next September in the Scottish city of Aberdeen, during the World Conference on Marine Biodiversity. The next chapter in the census will draw upon the tools used for this first census, including:

• OBIS: The Ocean Biogeographic Information System is an open-access database documenting the names and locales of 120,000 marine species. In the years to come, fresh observations can be compared with OBIS' baseline data to keep track of the rise and fall of species populations.
• DNA barcoding: Analysis of standard genetic markers can identify which species went where, even on the basis of a single fish scale.
• GEOSS: The Global Earth Observation System of Systems provides a foundation for standardized tracking of marine species by monitoring thousands of electronically tagged "bio-logger" animals, using sonar to look for marine life on the move, and setting up networks of mocrophones to track salmon and the ocean's other migrants. GEOSS is about more than just the oceans: It's an international effort to link together observation systems for a wide spectrum of Earth phenomena, ranging from seismic monitoring networks to satellite imagery databases.
• ARMS: Underwater Autonomous Reef Monitoring Structures, which Poiner compared to "small dollhouses designed in a careful way [to] see what's happening with coral reef diversity," have helped standardize monitoring systems for species in the world's reefs.

One of the census' most eye-opening findings has to do with just how much more is out there still to be found, even after a "decade of discovery." About 250,000 marine species bigger than microbes have been documented to date, but based on an analysis of the discovery rate so far, Poiner said "we know that number will grow to at least a million species, and it's likely to be much higher."

The marine microbial world is an even bigger frontier. The census documented 40,000 genetic sequences from more than 100 microbial families, or phyla, and that's just the start. "There's a richness of microbes out there," Poiner told me. "The estimated kinds of marine microbes could be up to a billion."

So although Poiner, Grassle and their colleagues are in a celebratory mood today, they realize that today's big reveal is just a beginning, and by no means the end of the sea's story.

"All surface life depends on life inside and beneath the oceans," Poiner observed in today's news release. "Sea life provides half of our oxygen and a lot of our food, and regulates climate. We are all citizens of the sea. And while much remains unknown, including at least 750,000 undiscovered species and their roles, we are better acquainted now with our fellow travelers and their vast habitat on this globe."

More wonders of the deep:

• August's highlights from the marine census
• Deep-sea creatures of the Coral Sea
• Marine marvels from Papua New Guinea
• Celebrities of the Celebes Sea
• Aliens lurk in Antarctic depths
• New species from Australia's coral reefs
• Thousands of new species in ocean's depths

Don't miss clicking through our slideshow highlighting some of the weirder and more wonderful species documented by the Census of Marine Life. Among the newly released resources are:

• "First Census of Marine Life 2010: Highlights of a Decade of Discovery," a 64-page summary of the census' work.
• "Discoveries of the Census of Marine Life: Making Ocean Life Count," a 304-page overview of the census' scientific insights and their implications.
• "Life in the World's Oceans: Diversity, Distribution and Abundance," a 384-page summary of findings and discoveries by the 17 census projects.
• "Citizens of the Sea: Wondrous Creatures from the Census of Marine Life," a 216-page coffee-table book providing portraits of about 100 species.
• A National Geographic Society map showing the distribution and travel patterns of ocean species on one side, and the past, present and future of ocean life on the other side.
• New scientific reports added to the Public Library of Science's open-access Collections and Biodiversity Hub.
• A song inspired by the census, titled "Look to the Sea," which will be available for downloading as a music video starting Wednesday.

Visit the brand-spanking-new Cosmic Log page on Facebook and hit the "Like" button. You can also follow @boyle on Twitter. And if you really want to be friendly, ask me about "The Case for Pluto."

The Expedition Titanic crew pulled into port in Newfoundland today, ending their North Atlantic adventure earlier than planned. But this isn't the final chapter of the historic shipwreck's saga.

For one thing, there are mountains of data to go through — including HD video of the site in 3-D as well as sonar readings gathered by high-tech vehicles operating two and a half miles beneath the surface of the North Atlantic. The main aim of Expedition Titanic is to create the most comprehensive maps and visual record where the ship tragically came to rest 98 years ago. The Titanic was considered "unsinkable," but it struck an iceberg on its maiden voyage and went down, taking 1,517 victims with it.

The RV Jean Charcot had to leave the site late Wednesday due to the approach of Hurricane Igor, a monstrous storm stretching across 1,000 miles of the Atlantic. But researchers say they were able to get what they came for despite the forced early exit.

"We certainly have all the data we talked about — the clues to what happened to the Titanic," Dave Gallo, expedition co-leader and a researcher at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts, says in a video clip sent back from the ship. "What story can we tell from what we've seen? Are we going to change the story that exists, or are we going to come up with a new story? We haven't had the time — we've been collecting the data — to go back and look at it. ... Now we need to go back and start to look at all these things."

One of the tales to untangle has to do with the Titanic's largely intact bow, which has become the wreck's signature image. Why does the front of the ship seem to be in such good shape? Did the bow plow into the ocean bottom directly, or did a different area of the ship take the brunt of the impact, allowing the bow to settle in more gently?

The detailed imagery is likely to help researchers refine their models for the Titanic's breakup and descent. P.H. Nargeolet, expedition co-leader and director of underwater research for RMS Titanic Inc., talks about what is known and still not known in the must-see video displayed above. He also says time is running out. Corrosion in the form of "rusticles" is clearly taking its toll on some key sections of the shipwreck, but not so much on others.

"In a few years, all the deck will collapse. That's for sure," Nargeolet says. "There's no question about that. The hull itself will be here for a long time."

Gallo says the Titanic's impermanence makes this expedition critically important. "The techniques that we're using here can be applied to other shipwrecks, if we find other wrecks," he says. "But in terms of protection of this site, it's invaluable. How do you protect something if you don't know what's here?"

Here's another first-run video that features highlights from the bow section. Pay particularly close attention to these artifacts:

• 00:00: The camera looks down at a cargo crane that is still largely intact.
• 00:30: A space heater, especially designed for use in the Titanic's best suites, lies out of place where third-class passengers exercised and took the sea air.
• 00:45: A door marks the entrance to third-class accommodations, not far from the crew's mess hall.
• 00:55: The Titanic's chains look as strong as they were 98 years ago.
• 01:10: One of the ship's anchors is encrusted with rusticles.
• 01:25: Sections of the hull are torn apart.

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Will this be the last visit to the Titanic? Not on your life. Deep Ocean Expeditions is touting a 2011 trip that features visits to the site in Russian submersibles for $40,000 per person ($5,000 if you just want to stay on the ship). The next year marks the centennial of the Titanic's sinking, and cruise packages are already being set up for the 100th anniversary. The 2012 cruises will include topside memorial services and perhaps even virtual visits to the underwater site itself, thanks to remotely operated vehicles.

But you won't have to sail to the North Atlantic to get in on the Titanic treatment in 2012. James Cameron, the film director who turned the tragedy into an Oscar-winning movies, has said that "Titanic" will be re-released in 3-D just in time for the centennial. That's old hat for Cameron: He pioneered 3-D moviemaking techniques back in 2003 for his Titanic documentary, "Ghosts of the Abyss," and turned 3-D into box-office gold in "Avatar."

The Titanic shipwreck site isn't the only underwater frontier that's in Cameron's sights. This week Australia's NewsCore reported that the director was commissioning the construction of a deep-sea submersible to take him down the planet's deepest ocean trench, Challenger Deep. The idea would be to capture footage for use in his "Avatar" sequel, which is set in an alien world's ocean, or perhaps in two other deep-sea movies that Cameron has in mind.

Cameron said that the submersible was "about half-completed," and that he planned to begin preparations for the dive sometime this year. "Avatar 2" is expected to come out in 2014.

More on the Titanic and 3-D views:

• Expedition bids farewell to Titanic
• Reports on Expedition Titanic from NBC News' Kerry Sanders
• Expedition Titanic website 
• RMS Titanic's Facebook page, Twitter feed, Flickr site, YouTube channel
• Blog postings from the Waitt Institute
• Titanic 3-D imagery from National Geographic (red-blue glasses required)

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