The remains of the Titanic, the world’s most famous shipwreck, have been digitally scanned in their entirety for the first time. The 3D images are amazing: They allow you to observe the boat as if the water had been drained.
The scan was carried out in mid-2022. Those responsible for the feat were Magellan Ltd, a deep sea mapping company, and Atlantic Productions. Together they are making a documentary about the project.
The scans were made possible by remote-controlled submersible robotic cameras. These artifacts passed more than 200 hours analyzing what was left of the Titanicfound at the bottom of the North Atlantic, off the coast of Canada.
The team achieved more 700,000 imagesreported the BBC. From these images, they put together a kind of puzzle to reconstruct the complete model in 3D.
The Titanic in 3D, an unprecedented project
Gerhard Seiffert, Magellan Ltd’s data manager and expedition director, said the depth (3,800 meters) posed a great challenge for the task. “There are also currents on the site and we are not allowed to touch anything so as not to damage the remains,” Seiffert explained to the British media.
It is the largest submarine project of its kind so far, say those responsible. The 3D model allows you to appreciate how the Titanic is separated into two parts: the bow located about 800 meters from the stern.
The entire structure is surrounded by a pile of rubble. There is everything: ship ornaments, statues, shoes, even unopened bottles of champagne.
The material shows both the scale of the ship and some small details. The serial number on one of the propellers, for example. The stern is a mess of metal scraps. This part of the ship collapsed when it sank to the bottom of the sea, on the night of April 14-15, 1912.
a historical document
The 3D scan of the Titanic allows you to win one at a time. The microbes are eating away at the structure and the parts are disintegrating. This model will preserve details that can serve as inputs for historians and other researchers to continue analyzing the historic accident, even when nothing remains of the ship.
“There are still questions, basic questions, that need to be answered,” Parks Stephenson, a Titanic analyst, told the BBC. The material, she said, is “one of the first important steps in moving the Titanic story toward evidence-based research, not speculation.”
Stephenson explained that key details, such as how the ship collided with the iceberg, are not yet known. “We don’t even know if it hit it on the starboard side, as shown in all the movies; it could have landed on the iceberg,” assured. Studying the details of the stern seen in the 3D model, for example, could reveal the mechanics of how the ship hit the seabed.
Although the Titanic sank in 1912, its remains were discovered in 1985. Since then, it has been the subject of much exploration. Its size and the darkness of the ocean floor are the main reasons why there is always something new to discover.