May 22, 2023: On its maiden trip from Southampton, England, to New York in April 1912, the Titanic perished after striking an iceberg, killing over 1,500 people. Link to the video inside.
More information regarding the ocean liner's tragic voyage over the Atlantic more than a century ago may be revealed by the first full-sized 3D scan of the Titanic shipwreck, which was published on Wednesday.
Deep-sea mapping was used to make the high-resolution photographs, which were released by the BBC and reconstruct the disaster in remarkable detail. It is located at a depth of about 4,000 metres (13,100 feet).
On its maiden journey from Southampton, England, to New York in April 1912, the luxurious passenger ship sank after striking an iceberg, killing over 1,500 people.
Since it was initially located in 1985, 650 kilometres (400 miles) off the coast of Canada, the shipwreck has been thoroughly studied, but cameras have never been able to fully capture the ship.
Deep-sea mapping company Magellan Ltd. and Atlantic Productions, who are producing a documentary on the project, completed the reconstruction in 2022.
Over 700,000 photographs were collected by remotely operated submersibles over the course of more than 200 hours as they surveyed the wreckage at the bottom of the Atlantic.
Gerhard Seiffert, the expedition planner for Magellan, told the BBC that they were forbidden from touching anything "in order to prevent damage to the wreck."
Click on the link to watch the video in BBC article:
https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-65602182
And on YouTube:
The requirement to map every square centimetre presents another issue. "Even uninteresting parts, like the debris field, must be mapped, but you need this to fill in between all these interesting objects," explained Seiffert.
The photographs portray the disaster, which has its stern and bow lying apart and is encircled by debris, as though it were being raised out of the water, revealing even the smallest details, such as the serial number on one of the propellers.
As scientists and historians race against time to understand what exactly happened to the liner, new scans could provide more information.
According to Parks Stephenson, a longtime Titanic researcher, "now we are finally getting to see Titanic without human interpretation, derived directly from evidence and data."
The wreck, which Stephenson described as "basically the last surviving eyewitness to the disaster," offers "still much to learn."
