On 15th of April 1912, White Star Line’s newest and the world’s largest ship of the time RMS Titanic, collided with an iceberg on her maiden voyage in Atlantic ocean and sunk, taking lives of more than 1500 people with her. It is one deadliest maritime disasters of all times. The tragic event took a solid place in history and memory of humanity. So many documentaries were made, books and movies were influenced by the tragic accident.
Titanic’s wreck was first discovered by Robert Ballard and his team in 1985. After the discovery of the wreckage, numerious expeditions were made and the teams took a big amount of footage. They brough some artifacts to surface enabling us to witness the tragedy closer.
It is also discovered that The wreck of the Titanic is decaying each day because of a metal eating bacteria and the crushing pressure of the water at the depth. As the time passes, the chance to get information from the wreck and solve the misteries which led the loss of the greatest ocean liner of the time is fading away with the debris.
While these are the facts, a new expedition shed light on Titanic, and gave a promising opportunity for researchers. Atlantic Productions and Magellan deep sea mapping company who are making a documentary about Titanic scanned the wreck in 3D in 2022. Although there are many detail footage of Titanic, a whole view of the wreck area was not available.
With the new 3D scans of Titanic and the debri field around two main sections of the ship which came apart during sinking, we are able to see the wreck as a whole. This enables researchers to study on the wreck with new opportunities and angles, and come up with answers for the mysteries and possibly throwing new questions.
The quality of the images are so good that they look as if the wreck was taken out of the sea bed to dry land. Magellan and Atlantic productions made this possible by taking more than 700000 images from every possible angle and location. The images are so clear, serial number on a propeller blade can be read easily.
It appears that the sinking of Titanic will continue to be an interesting topic for researchers for years to come.
Hope, we never witness such a tragedy again anywhere. Writing this article after loosing more than 50 thousand souls by the earthquakes took place at south east Turkey by official numbers leaves me with undescribable feelings. One can easily figure the enourmity of the disaster by seeing these numbers are only the confirmed deaths… From depths of Atlantic, to lands of Anatolia such a cultural mosaic, i once again write, hope we never face such tragedies anymore.
images by Atlantic/ Magellan