Never Before Seen Images and 3D Model of the Titanic
Photo Credit: Atlantic Productions/Magellan
The deep sea mapping company Magellan Ltd. has created the first ever full sized 3-D digital model of the Titanic, revealing never before seen details of the famous shipwreck.
When the Titanic struck an iceberg on Apr. 15 in 1912, more than 1,500 people died, and the ship sank 3,800m down into the Atlantic. In 1985, the sunken ship was discovered about 700 km off the coast of Canada.
Ever since, there have been countless explorations of the Titanic, but none have created a more accurate representation of the shipwreck than this expedition.
The underwater scanning project, the largest of its kind in history, was carried out by Magellan, a Guernsey-based firm, in collaboration with Atlantic Productions, who are currently creating a documentary on the project that is expected to come out next year.
Their hope was to discover more about what happened to the Titanic in 1912. "There are still questions, basic questions, that need to be answered about the ship," Parks Stephenson, a Titanic analyst, told BBC News.
He also added that the model is “one of the first major steps to driving the Titanic story towards evidence-based research — and not speculation.”
Submarines were used and remotely controlled by a team of researchers to capture images of the Titanic for the digital model. It took more than 200 hours for the submarines to survey the entire wreckage, and take 700,000 images from every angle to create the most precise reconstruction. After that, it took seven more months for researchers to take this massive amount of data and transform it into the 3-D model.
Anthony Geffen, the head of Atlantic Productions, told the Associated Press that previous pictures of the wreck were taken with low lighting, and only showed one area of the ship at a time. In contrast, the new photorealistic 3-D images show extraordinary new features of the ship, such as the clear and sharp reconstructions of the bow and stern sections, which broke apart from each other when the Titanic sank.
“All our assumptions about how it sank, and a lot of the details of the Titanic, comes from speculation, because there is no model that you can reconstruct, or work exact distances,” Anthony Geffen said. “I’m excited because this quality of the scan will allow people in the future to walk through the Titanic themselves [...] and see where the bridge was and everything else.”
Taking images for the digital model led to new discoveries. One of these new discoveries, as stated in ITV News, was the finding of a lost necklace made from a tooth from the prehistoric shark Megalodon embedded with gold.
However, because of an agreement between the UK and the US, members of the public are unable to remove artifacts from the Titanic wreck and the surrounding area. This is why the team from Magellan were unable to take the necklace, and left it at the site.
Magellan has instead decided to use artificial intelligence to find the family members of the 2,200 passengers onboard the Titanic when it sank, hoping to find the owner of the necklace.
They will be doing this by taking footage of passengers boarding the ship, and observing what clothes the passengers were wearing, as well as analyzing the video with technology such as facial recognition.
Richard Parkinson, CEO of Magellan, described the find of the necklace to ITV News as "astonishing, beautiful and breathtaking."