Brand new images of the ill-fated titanic may shed new light on how the iconic liner sank more than a century ago. For the first time a full-sized digital scan of the ship liner’s wreckage, which lies 12,500 feet below water on the floor of the Atlantic Ocean, has been developed using deep sea mapping
On April 15, 1912 the liner struck an iceberg during its ill-fated maiden voyage. Since then the wreck has sparked the imagination of people worldwide. Roughly 70% of the ship’s passengers and crew died in the icy waters, and these new scans may help to provide insight into exactly what happened on that deadly voyage.
Magellan Ltd, a deep-sea mapping company, in partnership with Atlantic Productions, a London-based company developed the scans last year. Anthony Geffen, the CEO of Atlantic Production had this to say via CBS News:
“I felt there was something much bigger here that we could get from the Titanic. If we could scan it, if we could capture in all its detail… we could find out how it sank and how the different parts of the boat fell apart and we can find a lot of personal stories down there as well.”
The first full-sized digital scan of the Titanic has been created using deep-sea mapping.
It provides a unique 3D view of the entire ship, enabling it to be seen as if the water has been drained away.The hope is that this will shed new light on exactly what happened to the… pic.twitter.com/rT8imgnAmB
— Ticia Verveer (@ticiaverveer) May 17, 2023
The scan is three-dimensional, and pictures the boat as if there was no water. Previous expeditions were only able to take video or still photos of the wreckage. The company mapping the ship, Magellan Ltd, had a different approach to the project.
Small submersibles boats, remotely controlled by a team on board a specialist ship, spent more than 200 hours analyzing the entirety of the wreck. The team took more than 700,000 pictures from every angle, creating an exact 3D reconstruction of the boat.
All of the painstaking work and detail led to a stunning view of the wreckage, and a sobering reminder of the loss of life.
The rust-colored wreckage lies in two parts, with the bow and the stern separated by over 2,600 feet in opposite directions. A huge field of debris surrounds the broken vessel.
The iconic bow remains instantly recognizable despite lying underwater for over a century.
In the debris surrounding the ship, lies miscellaneous items including ornate metalwork from the ship, statues and unopened champagne bottles.
There are also personal possessions, including dozens of shoes.
Considering how long the ship has sat at the bottom of the ocean, 111 years, it is nothing short of miraculous that so much detail is still able to be seen. The removal of the water aspect from the 3d mapping has made so much more detail available, all the way down to serial numbers on a propeller.
However, nothing lasts forever, and researchers are concerned that the wreckage will be gone in a few short years, lost to time.
“What we now have for the historical record is, before it falls apart, literally a record of everything to do with the wreck of the Titanic, which will be around forever,” he said.
Indeed, eventually the Titanic wreckage will be no ore than a memory, but at least there now is a solid vision of what it looks like, and perhaps more answers as to what went wrong.
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