On April 15, 1912, the legendary liner Titanic was flowing in the middle of the North Atlantic Ocean. More than a hundred years after its sinking, the ship and its fatal destiny continue to fascinate the crowds. How did the drama go exactly? What secrets still conceals the carcass lying by 3,821 meters deep? In 2022, the Magellan Marine Cartography Company deployed two remote -controlled vehicles to learn a little more about the tragedy.
The devices have captured some 715,000 photos of the Titanic, allowing to scan the wreckage of the ship in its current state, reports the Gizmodo media. This technological feat made it possible to discover new details on the collision with the iceberg and the sinking which cost the life of more than 1,500 people, details which will soon be exhibited in a documentary broadcast on the National Geographic channel.
Due to the colossal size of the wreckage and the darkness which reigns at these depths, the dives in submersible only deliver fragments – spectacular – of the ship, but never an overall vision. The 3D scan precisely offers this possibility: the two remote -controlled vehicles, Romeo and Juliet, collected 16,000 gigabytes of digital data to carry out their mission, that is to say the equivalent of “6 million e-booksS »Specifies Gizmodo. It is quite simply one of the largest submarine 3D scans ever made to date.
Fascinating! Recent 3D scans of the titanic pic.twitter.com/y4zdqoejs6
– Kate Drawdy (@gummoxxx) April 8, 2025
Thanks to this reconstruction, new elements on the conditions of the sinking have been highlighted, in particular the identification of a porthole apparently broken by the impact with the iceberg. A detail that seems to confirm the stories of the survivors of the time, according to which ice has invaded certain cabins at the time of the collision.
The ship sank the lights on
Another element that corroborates the stories of the rare survivors of the sinking: the presence of the lights on board until the last second. In one of the boiler rooms, experts were able to certify that the boilers were still in working order when submerged, which also confirms a valve open to the rear deck of the building. The steam continued to supply the electrical systems until the last moments of the Titanic.
“”This means that a team of engineers continued to operate boilers to maintain lighting as long as possible.»Gizmodo analysis. When the Titanic struck the iceberg in the middle of the night, these lights made it possible to put the waterproof canoes without being plunged into total darkness. No member of this team has probably survived, but their bravery made it possible to save the life of 711 survivors.
Experts have developed a computer simulation to analyze the collision with the iceberg in detail thanks to the recovered data. And their conclusions do not strengthen legend: the Titanic would have passed very close to it, reports Time magazine. The ship had indeed been designed to stay afloat even with four flooded compartments … but the collision damaged six. Note that some of the notches that caused the floods did not exceed the dimensions … of a simple A4 sheet.
The story behind the digitization work of the company Magellan will be found from April 11, 2025 in a documentary entitled Titanic: The Digital Resurrectionbroadcast on the National Geographic channel.
