First digital scan of Titanic provides new details of 1912 shipwreck Buzz News

London Deep sea researchers have completed the first full digital scan of TitanicShowing the entire wreckage with unprecedented detail and clarity, the companies behind a new documentary about the wreckage reported Thursday.

Using two remotely operated submersibles, a team of researchers spent six weeks last summer traversing the entire ship and the surrounding 3-mile wreckage field in the North Atlantic, where the liner passengers’ belongings, such as shoes and watches, were strewn Had happened

Richard Parkinson, founder and CEO of deep-sea exploration firm Magellan, estimated that the resulting data, consisting of 715,000 images, is 10 times larger than any underwater 3D model that has been attempted before .

“It’s a completely one-to-one digital copy, the Titanic’s ‘twin’,” said Anthony Geffen, director of documentary company Atlantic Productions.

The Titanic was on her maiden voyage from Southampton, England to New York City when it struck an iceberg off Newfoundland in the North Atlantic on April 15, 1912. The luxury liner sank within hours, a disaster that claimed the lives of nearly 1,500 people.

The wreckage, discovered in 1985, lies about 12,500 feet under the sea, about 435 miles off the coast of Canada.

Geffen noted that preview images of the Titanic were often affected by low light levels and only allowed viewers to see one area of ​​the wreckage at a time. He said the new 3D model captures both the bow and stern sections, which were separated when submerged, including the propeller serial number.

The researchers have spent seven months processing the vast amount of data collected and a documentary on the project is expected to be released next year. But beyond that, Geffen hopes the new technology will help researchers uncover more details about how the Titanic met its fate and allow people to interact with the story in new ways.

“All of our assumptions about how the Titanic sank, and many details of the Titanic, come from guesswork, as there is no model from which one can reconstruct or calculate the exact distance,” he said.