Researchers have pieced together debris from the Titanic to understand the final hours of the famed the ship and its passengers.
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| © Photograph by Emory Kristof, Nat Geo Image Collection A submersible's lights give a ghostly glow to the rusted prow of the RMS Titanic. The famed ocean liner, which sank after hitting an iceberg on April 14, 1912, was discovered in 1985 near Newfoundland under some 12,500 feet (3,800 meters) of water. |
From National Geographic
Many historical accounts of the sinking of the RMS Titanic
describe the 882.5-foot-long passenger ship as “slipping beneath the
ocean waves,” as though the vessel and its passengers drifted tranquilly
off to sleep, but nothing could be further from the truth. Based on
years of careful analysis of the wreck, which employed then
state-of-the-art flooding models and simulations used in the modern
shipping industry, experts are able to paint a gruesome portrait of Titanic’s last hours and minutes.
Earlier this month, research on the ship continued as a team of experts completed five manned submersible dives
at the site over an eight day span. Using high tech equipment, the team
captured footage and images of the wreck that can be used to create 3D
models for future augmented and virtual reality. The assets will help
researchers further study the past and future of the ship.
The Titanic
is in severe decay caused by salt corrosion and metal eating bacteria,
Caladan Oceanic, the company overseeing the expedition, said in an
announcement about the dives. A manned submersible reached the bottom of
the north Atlantic Ocean in August.
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| © Photograph by Emory Kristof, Nat Geo Image Collection Lights from a Mir submersible, a deep-sea vehicle with room for three people, expose the Titanic’s port anchor winch on the foredeck. |
The Titanic dive is being filmed by Atlantic Productions for
the documentary special, "Mission Titanic", which will air globally on
National Geographic in 2020.
“The most shocking area of
deterioration was the starboard side of the officers’ quarters, where
the captain’s quarters were,” said Titanic historian Parks Stephenson. The hull had started to collapse taking staterooms with it.
Scientists expect the erosion of the Titanic to continue.
“The future of the wreck is going to continue to deteriorate over time, it’s a natural process,” said scientist Lori Johnson.
The Titanic's fate was sealed on its maiden voyage from Southampton, England to New York City. At 11:40 p.m. on April 14, 1912, the Titanic
sideswiped an iceberg in the north Atlantic, buckling portions of the
starboard hull along a 300-foot span and exposing the six forward
watertight compartments to the ocean’s waters. From this moment onward,
sinking was a certainty.
The demise may have been hastened, however, when crewmen pushed open a gangway door on the port side of Titanic
in an aborted attempt to load lifeboats from a lower level. Since the
ship had begun listing to port, gravity prevented the crew from closing
the massive door, and by 1:50 a.m., the bow had settled enough to allow
seawater to rush in through the gangway.
By 2:18 a.m., with the
last lifeboat having departed 13 minutes earlier, the bow had filled
with water and the stern had risen high enough into the air to expose
the propellers and create catastrophic stresses on the middle of the
ship. Then the Titanic cracked in half.
Once released
from the stern section, the bow fell to the ocean floor at a fairly
steep angle, nosing into the mud with such massive force that its ejecta
patterns are still visible on the seafloor today.
The stern,
lacking a hydrodynamic leading edge like the bow, tumbled and
corkscrewed for more than two miles down to the ocean floor.
Compartments exploded. Decks pancaked. Heavier pieces such as the
boilers dropped straight down, while other pieces were flung off into
the abyss.
The wreckage
For decades, a number of expeditions sought to find the Titanic
without success—a problem compounded by the North Atlantic’s
unpredictable weather, the enormous depth at which the sunken ship lies,
and conflicting accounts of its final moments. Finally, 73 years after
it sank, the final resting place of Titanic was located by
National Geographic Explorer-in-Residence Robert Ballard, along with
French scientist Jean-Louis Michel, on September 1, 1985. The Titanic had come to rest roughly 380 miles (612 kilometers) southeast of Newfoundland in international waters. (Discover how the Titanic was found during a secret Cold War mission.)
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| © Photograph by Emory Kristof, Nat Geo Image Collection Lead researchers Bob Ballard (second from right) and Jean-Louis Michel (far right) survey video from the unmanned submersible Argo while searching for the lost ocean liner. “Argo exceeded our highest hopes; the robot’s ultrasensitive ‘eyes,’ or video cameras, could see and record in almost total darkness,” wrote Ballard in the December 1986 issue of National Geographic magazine. |
In
the years since Ballard’s expedition, visitors to the site have made
their mark: Modern trash litters the area, and some experts claim that
submersibles have damaged the ship by landing on it or bumping into it.
Organic processes are also relentlessly breaking down the Titanic: Mollusks have gobbled up most of the ship's wood while microbes eat away at exposed metal, forming icicle-like "rusticles."
"Everyone has their own opinion" as to how long Titanic will remain more or less intact, said research specialist Bill Lange of Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts.
"Some
people think the bow will collapse in a year or two," Lange said. "But
others say it's going to be there for hundreds of years."
What was lost
More than 2,000 passengers and crew were aboard the Titanic’s maiden voyage, but only 706 survived the trip.
Although the ocean liner could carry 3,511 passengers, the Titanic
only had lifeboats for 1,178 people. To make matters worse, not all of
the lifeboats were filled to capacity during the desperate evacuation of
the doomed ship. Most of the Titanic’s 1,500-odd victims died
of hypothermia at the surface of the icy water. Hundreds of people may
also have died inside the ship as it sank, most of them immigrant
families in steerage class, looking forward to a new life in America.
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| © Photograph by Emory Kristof, Nat Geo Image Collection Ballard, a scientist with the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, wears his signature baseball cap while poring over charts with fellow scientists aboard the research vessel Knorr. Woods Hole partnered with the Institut Francais de Recherche s pour L'exploitation des Mers (IFREMER) for the expedition. |
Along with the lives lost, something else went down with the Titanic:
An illusion of orderliness, a faith in technological progress, a
yearning for the future that, as Europe drifted toward full-scale war,
was soon replaced by fears and dreads all too familiar to our modern
world. (Test your knowledge of the famous ship.)
“The Titanic
disaster was the bursting of a bubble,” said filmmaker James Cameron.
“There was such a sense of bounty in the first decade of the 20th
century. Elevators! Automobiles! Airplanes! Wireless radio! Everything
seemed so wondrous, on an endless upward spiral. Then it all came
crashing down.”
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| © Photograph by Emory Kristof, Nat Geo Image Collection Two windows in the officers’ quarters now look out to a much darker view. |
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