First Full-Size 3D Scan Of Titanic Casts New Light On Shipwreck

According to the businesses behind a new documentary about the accident, deep-sea experts have finished the first full-size computer scan of the Titanic, which reveals the entire wreck in previously unheard-of detail and clarity.

Last summer, a team of experts spent six weeks in the North Atlantic documenting the whole shipwreck and the adjacent 3-mile debris field, where the passengers’ goods, such as shoes and watches, were dispersed.

According to Richard Parkinson, the founder and CEO of deep-sea exploration company Magellan, the resulting data, including 715,000 photos, is ten times bigger than any attempt at an underwater 3D model.

According to Anthony Geffen, director of documentary-making company Atlantic Productions, “It’s an exactly one-to-one digital copy, a ‘twin,’ of the Titanic in every aspect.

On April 15, 1912, the Titanic was on its first trip from Southampton, England, to New York City when it collided with an iceberg in the North Atlantic near Newfoundland. Within hours, the opulent ocean liner sank, killing around 1,500 people.

The wreck, found in 1985, is 435 miles (700 kilometers) off the Canadian coast, some 12,500 feet (3,800 meters) under the water.

According to Geffen, previous photographs of the Titanic were sometimes constrained by poor lighting and only enabled spectators to see one portion of the ruin at a time.

According to him, the new 3D model accurately depicts the bow and stern sections, which had split apart when the ship sank, in all their clarity, down to the propeller’s serial number.

The vast amount of data the researchers collected took seven months to generate, and a documentary about the effort is anticipated to be released in 2019. In addition, Geffen says he believes the new technology will enable people to engage with history in new ways and assist researchers in figuring out the specifics of how the Titanic met its demise.

“There is no model you can reconstruct or work exact distances,” he added. “All our assumptions about how it sank and many of the details of the Titanic come from speculation.”

“I’m thrilled because this scan’s quality will allow people to walk through the Titanic themselves in the future and see where the bridge was and everything else,” said the enthusiast.