Question
What happens to the ship at the end of the movie? In other words after they discover the element is not on board.
shareThey tow it back out to sea and scuttle it by blowing it into two pieces.
Then a few years later, some shmoe named Ballard comes along and finds both pieces and steals Dirk Pitt's thunder by claiming to find it first.
There, major historical continuity problem solved.
In the book it was never said what happen to the ship and also they used the element
shareIn the book Ann Archer's character is Seagram's wife and also works for NUMA as an underwater archeaologist. She had no other history with Pitt besides coworkers (although that changes later). She is along on the whole project to document everything and to preserve it. It was certainly implied in the book that Titanic is preserved as a museum ship, with her relics well looked after.