For a century the Titanic has been
hidden in darkness, two and a half miles
down at the bottom of the Atlantic. But
now a new investigation is about to
drain the ocean. Pull the plug of the
Atlantic and reveal the wreck. The
Titanic, as she's never been seen before
and in the bright light of day we
uncover critical new pieces of evidence
not previously visible.
From giant gouges on the ocean floor to damage from the iceberg that sliced
her open. A team of scientists equipped
with cutting-edge tools now tackle the
long-standing mysteries of the disaster
that could rewrite the Titanic's story.
Drained dry,
this is the wreck of the Titanic as
you've never seen it before. It's the
most infamous ship in all history - the
Titanic. From a time when ocean liners
are racing to be the biggest, the fastest
and the best, the RMS Titanic is a
technological marvel. When she set sail
in 1912 she's the largest moving
man-made object on the planet.
And unsinkable ship.
But around two and a half thousand miles
into her maiden voyage disaster.
1,500 passengers and crew dragged down
to the icy depths.
And over a century later we still don't
know exactly what happened that night,
how she sank and broke apart.
Hundreds of passengers and crew
witnessed the tragedy and live to tell
the tale.
Yet despite this there remain
countless unanswered questions. We have
lots of historical information but often
there are biases in in those historical
accounts. Even the eyewitnesses of the
sinking in the Titanic had many different
perceptions of how that sinking took
place. So the best way to unravel some of
those those questions is to use science.
Explorers first discovered the Titanic's
wreckage in September in 1985. Since then
more than 20 expeditions have gone back
to the ship. Two and a half miles down
this is a place as alien as the surface
of the Moon.
Only a few yards of the Titanic's hull
are visible in the explorers' headlights
at any one time. Nobody's ever been able
to see the whole wreck or even find the
edges of the site. In the past trying to
understand Titanic with the existing
technology was like trying to draw a map
of downtown Manhattan. From the height of
a ten-story building, in a vehicle that
has the windows fogged, up it's pitch
black
and you're trying to look at it through
a flashlight. Challenging to say the
least.
Critical clues to understanding the
disaster
still lurk in this darkness. Now a team
of scientists funded by the legal
steward of the wreck RMS Titanic Inc are
set to change all that and bring the
Titanic into the clear light of day for
the first time. An epic high-tech
investigation to discover exactly how
and why she sank.
The Titanic mapping project. The mission
use cutting-edge sonar mapping
technology to scan every part of the
wreck and build a precise digital model
of the Titanic as she sits on the ocean
floor. Their data will allow us to
virtually heel back the sea,
strip away trillions of gallons of the
Atlantic Ocean and two and a half miles
down revealed the unsinkable Titanic.
Drained dry on the ocean floor.
But scanning the deep ocean isn't easy.
Autonomous underwater vehicles AUVs
have to dive down through 12,000 feet of
water. It's incredibly challenging to
work at Titanic, it's dangerous, it's a
very dangerous place.
Investigators program the AUVs to fly as
close as 30 feet above the wreck. The
underwater drones then fire signals
measuring variations in height down to
the tiniest detail. They crisscross the
wreck and seabed like mowing a gigantic
lawn. Each path scans a hundred and fifty
foot wide strip gathering millions of
data points.
Next the team deploys an ROV - a
remote-controlled sub attached by cable
to capture thousands of digital images
of every point on the wreck.
Every single thing these vehicles would
come back with some new bit of
information about what was on the bottom.
A tidal wave of new data comes to the
surface. Over 160 hours of video. In total
37 terabytes of data. But to see what
they've got takes time. Over the next weeks banks of
computers crunch the raw data turning
millions of sonar points into a complex
module of the wreck. I remember all of us
sort of sitting around the computer when
we first were building the 3D layer and
seeing the bow and seeing the stern in so
much detail we were all sort of grinning
at the screen looking at all their data
and seeing that for the first time this
was pretty amazing. At the same time
visualization expert Bill Lang begins
stitching together thousands of
individual images of the wreck.
A task that takes him and his team at
Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution six
months to complete. It was a very long
and tedious process. There were over 200
other mosaics that were done for sight
interpretation and future archaeological
work. This ultra high-def imagery
together with the 3D scan can now unlock
a new vision of the Titanic. A wreck
that's been shrouded in darkness for
over a century.
It's been four years in the making. But
now
we can strip bare an extraordinary
landscape. Pull the plug from the
Atlantic.
Two and a half miles down giant walls of
steel tower into the sky.
Sunlight hits her decks once more
and countless clues to the disaster
start to emerge.
This is
the drained wreck
of the Titanic.
We've drained the Titanic and for the
first time we can see the ship in its
entirety. In unprecedented detail. Now
investigators can map out the site's
boundaries. And archaeologists can get an
overview of a wreck that's been hidden
for over a hundred years. It's almost
like the fog has been cleared away and
you can now start to see through the perpetual darkness. The idea of draining the
Titanic presents the site in a whole
different light. It's not impenetrable,
it's right there in front of us to
explore.
The Titanic's wreckage is spread out
over half a square mile of the exposed
ocean floor. An area of some 200 football
fields.
The site of RMS Titanic can be described
pretty basically as two large features:
the bow section and the stern section
which about half a mile apart and
then numerous debris fields. In all
there are five debris fields each
scattered with fragments of the ship
and objects that tumbled out as she sank.
The stunning vistas unleashed by the new
model bring the Titanic back to life.
With the waters stripped away her story
is laid out in plain sight. People think
science is above emotion you know when
you're looking at a boat deck where you
know so many people say "Goodbye" to one another. These are important points on
that ship. The guardrails where on that
freezing night fathers hugged their
children, set them in the lowering lifeboats,
leaned out to catch a final glimpse of
their loved ones. Portholes where
passengers trapped below deck saw the
starry sky for the last time as the ship
slipped beneath the waves. And even the
mast of the crow's nest where lookout
Frederick Fleets voice shattered the
silence of the night as he first spotted
the looming iceberg.
The Titanic's iconic eight-ton anchors
still in place gleam in the bright
daylight for the first time in over a
century. And with the ocean now sucked
dry her enormous bow section towers
above the seabed. Despite the violence of
the sinking and all that time on the
bottom what's inside that bow in
particular is still a ghostly sense of
the ship that was. Inside the bow
were many of the most luxurious of the
ship's features.
The grand staircase running the height
of five decks.
The heated swimming pool reserved for
first-class passengers only.
And a state-of-the-art gym positioned
right up on the boat deck.
The model reveals just how intact this
section of the ship really is. Almost
perfectly upright. The ghostly shell of
the Titanic seems to be sailing across
the seabed. Her prow parting the mud
almost like water.
With 40 feet of the bow above the ocean
floor a full 60 feet must be buried.
Equivalent to a six-story building. Using
the depth to which it carved into the
seabed investigators are refining their
calculations of the impact speed. Its
descent was very smooth it had its
aerodynamic nose facing into the
direction of travel. So there is no
tumbling and was not particularly violent until
the very last moment.
Once separated from the rest of the ship
the bow sank first at about 35 miles
per hour. At an angle of 15 to 30 degrees.
Its impact with the seafloor was like a
gigantic 28,000 ton truck slamming into
a snowdrift.
When the bow finally reached the bottom it
ploughed in to the dirt, almost all the way
to the anchors. With the darkness of
the deep drained away it's crystal clear
here the impact is frozen in time. The
investigation still probing the data
hoping to learn more about how the bow
reached the bottom and the fact that the
bow's intact means that they can also
examine the most iconic mystery of the
Titanic - the iceberg impact.
The official 1912 accident report seems
to suggest the iceberg tore a gigantic
300-foot gash in the ship's right-hand
side. Ripping open over a third of her
entire hull. However eyewitness records prove the
Titanic took around two and a half hours
to sink. Investigators are puzzled a
300-foot hole would surely have sunk the
Titanic in a matter of minutes.
Oceanic explorer PH Nargeolet has made 30
trips 12,000 feet down to the Titanic.
But he's never seen a 300-foot gash. We
were trying to find where the Titanic
hits the iceberg, why it was like
that, why we we saw we saw some crack
why there is a crack here and not here?
Nargeolet and the team now turn to the
ultra-high resolution photo mosaics of
the wreckage to see what evidence there
might be.
This profile view of the bow is stitched
together from over 3,000 individual
images. The profile mosaics show Titanic
in way that people hadn't seen it
before, no one had done a profile view of
Titanic's bow in the 25 years that
people been going to Titanic. Here again
even with these pin sharp images they
find no sign of anything approaching a
300-foot tear on the hull. However when
they turn to the video footage
investigators can see much smaller areas
of impact damage. The actual iceberg
damage appears to be confined to a maybe
a 30 foot length of the bow wasn't like
a gash and it wasn't tens of small gashes.
The size of these gaps in the hull add
up to just 11 square feet. A breach this
size would allow 370 gallons of sea
water to gush in every second.
And when they analyzed how quickly this
would have sunk the Titanic it turns out
to be two and a half hours. Exactly the
time the ship actually took to sink.
An enduring mystery is solved. The
investigations further confirmed that
the giant gash is fiction. And that the
iceberg made only small punctures below
the waterline. But together were enough to
trigger disaster. But for the team
there's an even bigger question looming
that our new model could shed light on.
When and where did the ship get torn in
half?
How did her bow become separated from
her stern by a staggering 2,000 feet? The
answer is here in broad daylight on the
drained sea floor in the exposed wreck
of the Titanic.
We're peeling back the Atlantic Ocean.
Draining its waters to reveal the
wreckage of the Titanic.
This is what the ship looks like today
without two and a half miles of
pitch-black ocean blocking out the
sun. 2,000 feet beyond the massive bow
section in the heart of the debris
fields lies the dismembered stern - the
back end of the ship. It's the second
largest fragment - 392 feet long. But it's
immediately obvious it's in very
different condition to the bow. The stern
is a mess, it looks like it's been ripped
up like confetti. The stern today is pure
chaos.
Some of the stern's huge metal components
are still intact like the 40-foot high
engines each the size of a large house.
But our highly detailed model also shows
deck's collapsing as if crushed together.
Heavy steel beams twisted and torn like
straws. It's hard to figure out what
you're looking at. To me it almost looks
like a giant piece of metal sitting
on the sea floor but tough to make it answer piece of a ship. Why is it in such bad
condition? investigators have struggled
to fully explain this. The stern section
has its problems and interpretation
because it's so completely broken up. But
within the model
there's a vital clue something that
could unlock the stern's violent story.
on the acoustic map you can see that the
Stern was turning counterplot it's a
massive mark carved into the seabed when
the stern made impact scientists can now
read the tracks and interpret how the
stern impacted the seafloor you can see
very well when the stern hit the bottom
the Sun was still turning and you can
see the bottom of the ship on port side
showing that the Sun was turning instead
time the marks allow investigators to
work out the speed of impact it turns
out that the stern was moving through
the water at 50 miles per hour massive
forces from chaotically whipping through
the ocean at such speed help explain why
the stern is so badly damaged
while the hydrodynamic bow slice cleanly
through the water and remained largely
intact if you have a plane that's
damaged in flight the air will get under
the skin of the plane and rip pieces off
the same thing would likely have
happened with the Titanic's rapidly
disintegrating stone at first large
chunks came off and then once the
structure resisted small pieces like
confetti started to fly away
investigators think high pressure water
may Denham found a route into the ship's
internal structure slamming into its
interior walls once the hull is
separated from the frames water will
blast through it'll form around all
those interior walls were wouldn't they
didn't stand a chance the water started
coming through at full force
they were pulverized
to the team this is more evidence for
why the stone now looks like a massive
car wreck while the bio section remains
intact
it's another answer to the mystery
the investigation has now clarified how
the two main sections of the ship
reached the bottom it's also shown how
they impacted and why they look so
completely different but there's still
one major question to tackle how and
when did the Titanic break apart
with cutting-edge technology we've
drained the depths of the Atlantic Ocean
and expose the final resting place of
the Titanic
after a hundred years of Darkness iudex
want norvasc in the warmth of the Sun
between the bow and stern a massive
debris field stretches out for hundreds
of feet
for the investigators it's a view
they've never seen before every piece is
a potential clue in solving the mystery
of how and why the Titanic broke apart
for years the dominant theory has been
that she split in two on the surface
as the sinking bowel angled down lifting
the stern high into the air its own
unsupported weights became too much the
ship snapped in half
but with the ocean now drained away new
clues are emerging that could challenge
that theory by looking at the pattern in
which the debris fell to the ocean floor
investigators can retrace the way it
fell from the ship they'll use this
forensic record to get an accurate
picture of how and when the boat tore
itself to pieces but getting the answer
will require a massive effort the team
must scan all the new underwater data to
ID and tag the position of as many
objects as possible and build a massive
digital map of the artifacts from the
ocean floor it includes the positions of
the 5,000 or so objects previous
expeditions have recovered from the
wreck
it's a catalogue of treasures ornate
statues from the ship's grand stairway
chandeliers the once hung in the
first-class smoking room the finest
crockery from the ship's best restaurant
there's even one of the Titanic's bronze
bells and pieces of nautical equipment
from the docking bridge every precious
object is a critical data point and
could help rewrite the story of how the
ship came apart the patterns that are
emerging from this remapping of the site
don't fit any of the traditional models
that were there before the work will
take years to complete there's coffee
cups dinner plates bits of chandeliers
deck benches that's full of objects from
the ship but also personal objects as
well each data point on the map is also
a story in itself
a touchstone that reveals a detail of a
human life these were all real people
who had lives who had people who loved
them families who were impacted by what
happened on that night some artifacts
are highly personal delicate jewelry
that may once have graced the neck of a
society lady and perfume bottles with
their precious liquid still inside
it's just a very beautiful very
emotional moment just to see everything
lying there on the ground it's a visual
story of that tragedy after years of
research alex klingelhoefer is now able
to tie some of these belongings to
specific named individuals this is a
pocket watch and open face style watch
this one still has its hand it probably
stopped when it was immersed in the
water the watch came from this spot in
the debris field 1,100 feet southeast of
the stone
it belonged to Thomas Williams Solomon
Brown he was a hotelier from South
Africa and he was headed with his family
to make a new start in the western part
of the United States he did not survive
however his wife and his daughter Edith
did
other passengers even left behind
written traces of their lives still
legible after a century in the water a
notebook found 780 feet from the stone
in the West debris field belonged to a
young third class passenger Edgardo
Samuel Andrew you're 17 years old
when you look at his belongings you find
schoolbooks you can still see the
writing in here even though it's quite
stained he is the pencil and the pencil
has for me illegible here on this page
he's writing his name I guess practicing
writing his name in the correct way you
begin to see just this young boy going
third class by himself to America
Edgardo was hoping to make a better life
for himself like so many immigrants
traveling to the New World
unfortunately Edgardo did not survive
the voyage that's why this is perhaps
such a heartrending object because it's
his last notations he's finished with
school he throws his schoolbooks into
the suitcase and he heads off to America
and that's blessed that we hear of him
there are many more objects the team
hoped to examine further some with the
potential to flesh out the human face of
the tragedy oftentimes history swallows
up the ordinary folks all of us we just
tend to go away archaeological sites
give us an opportunity to correct that
now the investigations define this
ghostly place as an archaeological site
it will help them protect the Titanic
story for generations to come
each of the priceless artifacts is part
of a mosaic of tragic stories
and together they now form a picture the
fully mapped debris field is at last
ready to give the investigators the
crucial answer they've long been waiting
for when and where the Titanic broke
apart in the two and a half hours it
took the Titanic to sink over 700 people
made it off the ship and into lifeboats
hundreds of these survivors witnessed
the sinking yet there's always been
disagreement about how and when the ship
broke apart there are still different
theories and arguments as to how things
exactly happened when the ship tore into
now some investigators think the new
data could prove once and for all what
really happened in recent years the
dominant theory has been that the
break-up occurred while the Titanic was
still on the surface we know from
eyewitnesses that the stern tilted up
out of the water as she sank some
experts have argued this created immense
stresses tearing the ship in two but
bill Lange now thinks otherwise
according to him the new data paints a
different picture on the drained ocean
floor are all the clues he needs to
Bill's trained eye there's nothing
random about the patterns of the debris
field like blood spatters at a crime
scene they tell a story
now flooded in daylight for the first
time with every last corner of the
debris field scanned and analyzed he can
work out how the Titanic really sank
it's going to tell us a lot more about
what happened to the ship after it left
the surface made this two-and-a-half
mile descent seafloor and hopefully tell
us more about what happened to Titanic
during its breakup the build was a key
piece of evidence visiting for the first
time in the new images of the exposed
ocean floor it's the overall scale of
the debris field the new survey
definitively mapped the salt and for the
first time investigators to now see the
precise dimensions they're not quite the
size they expected
I think the site really isn't that big
when you consider the size of the ship I
mean we've got a almost thousand foot
long ship there's an two square miles if
the ship had fully separated on the
surface bill thinks that be a much
larger scattering area considering that
it fell a few miles through water column
I think that the scattering of artifacts
is rather small the lower in the water
the separation the less distance for
debris to spread out as it falls and the
more compact the pattern on the ocean
floor
it's a straightforward argument and for
bill it's evidence the ship separated
much deeper in the water and previously
thought that's the only way he can
explain the small scatter pen
one of the most important things I think
it's chromatophores if the ship may not
have broken up as fast and as shallow as
as what was originally thought
and when the theory's checked against
eyewitness accounts there's more
evidence
the survivors best position to see any
breakup was three men on the aft boat
deck their statements recall the funnels
falling away from the ship but no
large-scale disintegration and certainly
no snapping into Bill and his colleagues
around the country have much more work
to do before they arrive at final proof
but in their view
there's simply no other way to explain
the evidence to them one thing is beyond
doubt the Titanic did not separate
anywhere near the surface with powerful
new theories the investigation is
beginning to pay off the mountain of
data from the expedition that allowed us
to drain the ocean and create a new view
where we can spot clues others may have
missed
all the key events of the disaster left
traces on the wreckage or on the seabed
and they're here for us to see clues
that are bringing the final mysteries of
the Titanic into crisp focus
but while investigators now have a
sharper understanding of the history of
the wreck there's one key mystery they
still hope to unravel what will happen
to the Titanic in the future
this is the exposed Titanic as she looks
today after a century of decay in the
darkness
in the 30 years since she was found no
one's been able to see her quite like
this
as Titanic investigators study the model
expedition data and video it's becoming
ever clearer but month by month year by
year the ship is disappearing and it's
happening faster than some experts
expected pH na Jala has been going to
the rack for three decades and he's seen
a big change over time the distance
between the a deck and the B deck we was
easily 10 feet now is five six feet and
step by step the deterioration is going
close to the bridge soon all the decks
that will collapse on each other and
everything inside will be lost forever
investigators want to know why it's
happening so fast at these depths
there's very little oxygen in the water
so metal should rust extremely slowly
yet on the expedition footage they can
clearly see the ship caked in weird
formations that certainly look like some
kind of rust they even called them
rusticles I was absolutely stunned by
the size the colors
they're very orange and brown and yet
when you're close to the greens and
purples and reds and yellows and every
color of the rainbow in the lab they
x-ray pieces of rustical recovered from
the ship what they find inside isn't
what might be expected this is no
ordinary rust the structure inside this
hard looking shell is extremely fragile
they're filled with millions of ducts
and tunnels and passageways and all of
these little cavities and all sorts of
nutrients are stored in there for the
microbiologists on the team it's crystal
clear the rusticles are formed by living
organisms and when they run further
tests there's no doubting what these
organisms are bacteria we found five
different communities of bacteria living
inside of rascal and then you've got
another community living on the outside
makes them a very complex little beast
they figure out that some of these
little beasts are anaerobic bacterial
life forms that don't need oxygen to
survive instead for their energy supply
they extract iron and minerals from the
ship's metal work like a swarm of
microscopic piranhas billions upon
billions of them are feeding on the
wreck
the impact of the wrestles on this
extremely large ship is overwhelming by
studying these tiny creatures the
microbiologists can now confidently lay
down a time frame for the Titanic's
final destruction if we went back in 500
years Titanic would look fairly similar
to what the bow section is right now as
far as the hull would be it would still
be a very new shape or informal looking
dark ship
however I would expected the duration to
be from the back to the front so that a
lot of the promenade at deck would have
fallen onto itself if we were to revisit
Titanic in a thousand years I would not
be able to tell sort of the size of the
magnificent ship that she is today
I would expect that all of the decking
would be gone and the bow would be
filled with what would look like sort of
piles of rocks if you revisited certain
sections you would see that the
deterioration like greatly increase
simply because the damage that section
had sustained during thinking the
bacteria would have taken girders and
basically has encrusted them in
rusticles and deterrence
to the point of being a pile of iron ore
at the bottom of the sea floor
long before that the titanic's
custodians will have to make some tough
decisions what do we do is do we stand
by and allow the bow section to collapse
upon itself or in the future do we
actually design some projects for
recovery of certain types of artifacts
from the bow section but any suggestion
of bringing up more artifacts is
controversial for some descendants of
those who lost their lives this is a
grave site and should be left alone
initially Dave Gallo agreed but since
the objects have been put on display
he's less sure we want to see the
Titanic exhibit and I realized then what
a powerful story time method it was to
have some of those artifacts with you so
you could just you could show someone
for me the artifacts are the historical
memory of the trip we can leave
everything on the bottom of the ocean
forever and it will be lost
however badly the Titanic deteriorates
one thing's for certain thanks to the
new science much of the ship can never
now be lost the edge of the site's been
defined for the first time so it's
archeology can be protected every inch
of the wreck inside the perimeter has
been scanned and analyzed
every known artifacts logged mapped and
captured in this digital duplicate world
that will never arose
frozen in time we can see and study the
wreck like never before
in broad daylight explorers now and in
the future can continue their
investigation here on the drained ocean
floor where the Titanic rests
