The Titanic, the world’s most famous shipwreck which lies 3,800m (12,500ft) down in the Atlantic, has been revealed as never seen before using deep-sea mapping.
The first full-sized digital scan 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 liner, which sank on 15 April 1912. More than 1,500 people died when the ship struck an iceberg on its maiden voyage from Southampton to New York.
“There are still questions, basic questions, that need to be answered about the ship,” Parks Stephenson, a Titanic analyst, told BBC News.
He said the model was “one of the first major steps to driving the Titanic story towards evidence-based research – and not speculation.”
The Titanic has been extensively explored since the wreck was discovered in 1985. But it’s so huge that in the gloom of the deep, cameras can only ever show us tantalizing snapshots of the decaying ship – never the whole thing.
The new scan captures the wreck in its entirety, revealing a complete view of the Titanic. It lies in two parts, with the bow and the stern separated by about 800m (2,600ft). A huge debris field surrounds the broken vessel, BBC News reports.
The scan was carried out in the summer 2022 by Magellan Ltd, a deep-sea mapping company, and Atlantic Productions, who are making a documentary about the project.
Submersibles, remotely controlled by a team on board a specialist ship, spent more than 200 hours surveying the length and breadth of the wreck.
They took more than 700,000 images from every angle, creating an exact 3D reconstruction.
The Titanic carried some of the wealthiest people in the world
The Titanic was the largest ship afloat at the time she entered service and the second of three Olympic-class ocean liners operated by the White Star Line. She was built by the Harland and Wolff shipyard in Belfast.
Thomas Andrews, the chief naval architect of the shipyard, died in the disaster. Titanic was under the command of Captain Edward Smith, who went down with the ship.
The ocean liner carried some of the wealthiest people in the world, as well as hundreds of emigrants from Great Britain and Ireland, Scandinavia, and elsewhere throughout Europe, who were seeking a new life in the United States and Canada.
The first-class accommodation was designed to be the pinnacle of comfort and luxury, with a gymnasium, swimming pool, smoking rooms, high-class restaurants and cafes, a Turkish bath and hundreds of opulent cabins.
Among the passengers of the Titanic were four Greek nationals who perished. Panagiotis Lymberopoulos, Vassilios Katavelos, Apostolos Chronopoulos, and Demetrios Chronopoulos all came from the same village, Agios Sostis in the Messinia region of the Peloponnese. The last two men were brothers.
Like many of the passengers, the four friends were young—the oldest one was only 33 years old—and they were going to America in search of a better life.
Tragically, their dreams, like those of so many others who perished on that night, never materialized.
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