EXCLUSIVE TITANIC ARTIFACT FIRST-TIME PUBLIC UNVEILING

A necklace that went on display at TITANIC: The Exhibition in Orlando, Florida, on June 11 might call to mind the romanticized image of Rose’s “Heart of the Ocean” pendant from the 1997 film.

- Ross Mumford

But beyond Hollywood's fiction, it’s the real artifacts—carefully recovered and preserved personal belongings—that carry the weight of true history.

The newly conserved necklace fragments are both delicate and haunting. The piece is made of black glass heart-shaped beads and octagonal beads arranged in an intricate pattern and helps tell the story of passengers on board that fateful voyage in 1912.

THE AMAZING DISCOVERY

Recovered during a 2000 expedition, the necklace had remained hidden for decades, obscured inside a concretion, a hard mass formed by the fusion of sediment and multiple objects under extreme pressure and deep-sea conditions.