The detail is jaw-dropping.
Mysterious
New 3D scans of the Titanic just dropped — and dear reader, they’re absolutely incredible.
As the BBC reports, these mind-blowing scans are the first of their kind and show in amazing detail how the entire wreck, which sunk 111 years ago, would look if the whole thing were to be miraculously moved to dry land.
In spite of the amount of time and study that’s occurred since the luxury ocean liner sank in 1912, experts still disagree on key details — lingering gaps in our knowledge that these 3D scans may hopefully help answer.
“There are still questions, basic questions, that need to be answered about the ship,” Parks Stephenson, executive director of the USS Kidd Veterans Museum, who has worked with “Titanic” director James Cameron extensively, told the BBC.
The project, which was carried out last summer, is “one of the first major steps to driving the Titanic story towards evidence-based research — and not speculation,” he added.
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
Close-Up
Deep sea-mapping company Magellan Ltd. teamed up with documentary maker Atlantic Productions to collect the extensive scans using remote-controlled submersible cameras.
The robotic cameras spent a total of more than 200 hours surveying the wreckage that sits at the bottom of the North Atlantic off the coast of Newfoundland and Labrador, Canada. The result was a whopping 700,000 images for the project, the BBC reports, which the researchers stitched together to reconstruct the detailed 3D model.
“The depth of it, almost 4,000 [meters], represents a challenge,” Gerhard Seiffert, the Magellan data manager who led the expedition, told the BBC, “and you have currents at the site, too — and we’re not allowed to touch anything so as not to damage the wreck.”
Stephenson told the British broadcaster that he was “blown away” when he saw the scans, which go into such minute detail as to show a serial number on one of the propellers.
“It allows you to see the wreck as you can never see it from a submersible, and you can see the wreck in its entirety, you can see it in context and perspective,” he told the BBC. “And what it’s showing you now is the true state of the wreck.”
More than a century later, the Titanic remains one of the ocean’s most iconic disaster sites — and these scans let us see it in closer detail than ever before.
A new view of the Titanic! New scans reveal the world’s most famous wreck as never seen before. They show the wreck in its entirety – it’s as if the water has been drained away… Check it out here #Titanic
(Footage: @AtlanticProds/ Magellan) pic.twitter.com/1nOdfc7mWb— Rebecca Morelle (@BBCMorelle) May 17, 2023
More on the world under the sea: Scientists Discover Leak in the Bottom of the Ocean