His name was Paul-Henri Nargeolet, the ex soldier and explorer of the deep sea who disappeared with the crew of the submarine Titan
Paul-Henri NargeoletFrench, is one of those who disappeared on Sunday with the crew of the submarine Titan, which imploded during a visit to the wreck of the Titanic. He was a former submariner became a deep sea dive specialist and enthusiast of maritime archaeology.
A career in the Navy and a passion for marine archeology
Before the mission, the businessman Hamish Harding, also aboard the Titan, had welcomed the participation of Paul-Henri Nargeolet. Originally from Haute-Savoie and now 77, this deep-sea explorer spent the first part of his career as an officer in the Marina.
Commander of the diving group of Cherbourg (town overlooking the Channel, in northern France), it then became submarine pilot with the “Groupe d’intervention sous la mer”, part of the same French Navy. From there he moved on to maritime archeology, finding several shipwrecks on behalf of the “Groupe de recherche d’archéologie naval” association.
Dozens of explorations on the seabed
The real turning point in his career came in 1986, when he became manager of intervention submarines in deep water at the French Research Institute for the Exploitation of the Sea (Ifremer). A year earlier, a team led by the American scientist Robert Ballard, in collaboration with Ifremer, had found the wreck of the Titanic. Which in 1987 the same Nargeolet coasted aboard the French submarine Nautile. Dozens of other dives followed over the years which unearthed several hundreds of items.
The last ones were carried out in the summer of 2021, as told by the submariner himself in a long interview published on the website of La Cité de la Mer, a museum in Cherbourg. “During our last dive on the bow of the Titanic, in the absence of current, which is very rare, we were able to see parts of the wreck from a different angle, which made the dive particularly interesting,” he said.
He had also participated in the search for the Rio-Paris flight that disappeared in 2010
In 2007, Nargeolet became director of the research program of the RMS Titanic/Phoenix International, the company that owns the wreck. But the ex-military did not limit his activities to the study of the ship: he participated in several search campaigns for ships of which traces have been lost and even those of the Airbus A330-203 which disappeared during the Rio-Paris flight In 2010.