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London (AFP) – The first life-size, three-dimensional scan of the Titanic’s wreckage was released Wednesday and may help scientists more accurately determine the condition of the most famous shipwreck, which occurred in 1912.
These never-before-seen, high-resolution images, released by the BBC, were created using deep-sea mapping.
They reconstruct in great detail the remains of the ship, sunk in the sea at almost 4,000 meters deep.
The luxurious ocean liner sank after colliding with an iceberg on its maiden voyage from the English city of Southampton to New York in April 1912.
Of the 2,224 passengers and crew aboard the ship, the world’s largest ocean liner at the time it was chartered, more than 1,500 died.
Its wreckage has been the subject of extensive exploration since it was first discovered in 1985 some 400 miles off the coast of Canada, but cameras were never able to capture the ship in its entirety.
This reconstruction was carried out in 2022 by the underwater mapping company Magellan Ltd and by Atlantic Productions, which is making a documentary on the project.
Remotely controlled submersibles from a specialized ship spent more than 200 hours surveying the wreckage of the Titanic at the bottom of the Atlantic, taking more than 700,000 images to create the scanner.
They were not allowed to touch anything “so as not to damage the remains,” Gerhard Seiffert, head of Magellan Ltd, who led the expedition, told the BBC.
“The other challenge was that you had to map every square inch, even the uninteresting bits like the mud in between the rubble, which you still need to fill the space between interesting objects,” he explained.
“We managed to see the Titanic without human interpretations”
The images show the ship, with its stern and bow separated and surrounded by rubble, as if it had been lifted from the seabed, revealing even the smallest details, such as the serial number on one of the propellers.
The new scanners could shed more light on exactly what happened to the liner, at a time when historians and scientists are racing against the clock as its wreckage continues to disintegrate.
“Now we finally get to see the Titanic without human interpretations, directly from evidence and data,” Parks Stephenson, a historian and engineer who has spent many years studying the most famous shipwreck in history, told the BBC.
“There is still a lot to learn” from the wreckage, which is “essentially the last surviving eyewitness to the catastrophe,” he said. “And he has stories to tell.”
