Nations working together to protect wreck site

With support from Canada, Britain and France, the United States Congress is now considering legislation to increase protection for the Titanic wreck site.

State Department spokesman Sean McCormack told the Associated Press that concerted action by the four countries most closely associated with the Titanic would effectively foreclose financing for and the technical ability to conduct unregulated salvage and other potentially harmful activities.

McCormack said a previous agreement on the Titanic signed by President Ronald Reagan in 1986 and the current legislation, if enacted, will designate the wreck site as "an international maritime memorial to those who lost their lives in its tragic sinking and whose grave should be given appropriate respect."

Titanic rests 12,000 feet beneath the surface of the North Atlantic some 350 miles east of Newfoundland. The wreck was located in 1985 by a joint U.S.-French expedition and has been the subject of hundreds of salvage dives in the two decades that followed.

"By enacting this legislation and becoming party to the agreement, the United States will become a leader in the international community in protecting perhaps the most important historic shipwreck in history in accordance with the most current standards of scientific, historic and cultural resource protection, conservation and management, " McCormack said.