Titanic like you've never seen it: Researchers have new insight into ship's final moments
Titanic researchers have new insight into what happened in the ocean liner's famous final moments, confirming eyewitness accounts and contradicting others for the first time.
That's thanks to a digital scan of the ship that Titanic researchers have been scouring for the last two years. In a first look at their analysis, a new National Geographic documentary "Titanic: The Digital Resurrection" reveals how the ship's engineers worked heroically in those final moments, said Parks Stephenson, a Titanic analyst.
Stephenson said using the model, he's able to stand in Boiler Room 2 "where the engineers stood as they were trying to keep the power going, keep the lights on, keep the Marconi transmitter sending its distress signals until the hull literally tore apart around them and basically killed them all."
"They did their duty right to the end," Stephenson told Paste BN on Tuesday. "That's very powerful, and as an analyst, also it's very informative."
The revelation and others came from an in-depth analysis of what's known as the "digital twin" of the Titanic, a full-size, three-dimensional rendering of the wreckage, and was revealed in the documentary, which airs on Friday. The digital scan was the first of its kind, and allowed Stephenson and other researchers an unprecedented, life-size view of the whole wreckage, which will eventually be available to the general public.
"When I saw the first renders from this model, I was absolutely blown away because Titanic has never been seen like this before," he said.
The ship sank after striking an iceberg in the early morning hours of April 15, 1912, on its very first voyage. More than 1,500 people on board died. An enduring public fascination with the wreck since then has driven researchers to take several trips to the bottom of the sea to photograph and explore the ship's remains.
How researchers scanned the Titanic 12,500 feet below the sea
The scan was done in the summer of 2022 by Magellan and Atlantic Productions, which used a remote-controlled submersible to take more than 700,000 photos from all angles to create the reconstruction, BBC reported at the time.
The process took over 200 hours. The resulting model shows incredible detail of the wreck site, Stephenson said. Unlike viewing the ship's remains in the darkness from the porthole of a submersible at the bottom of the ocean, he can walk around the site and look at it from any angle, he said.
"I feel like I'm... on the ocean floor looking at the wreck with nothing to stop me from looking anywhere I want to look," Stephenson said.
What we learn in new documentary, and what's still left to learn
Stephenson said his observations about what happened in the boiler room are just one example of the physical confirmation of eyewitness accounts gleaned from the scan. With the detail available, researchers were also able to discover artifacts and personal possessions in the debris field that hadn't been seen before, he said.
Evidence in the debris field also contradicts popular understanding of First Officer William Murdoch's final moments, which are portrayed in the 1997 film "Titanic" as suicide.
"We have direct evidence from the wreck from this digital scan that supports the account of one of his brother officers who saw him, instead of shooting himself as some accounts have had... that he was actually loading one last lifeboat to be launched when the water overtook him and all the other men at that station to their deaths," Stephenson said.
There are still many questions left unanswered about what happened to the Titanic and, Stephenson said, misconceptions that have dominated the accepted narrative. The scan is the first rendering of Titanic's final resting place created entirely from data without human interpretation or bias, and will become a "baseline" for viewing the wreck as an archeological site, he said.
"Titanic is the last surviving witness to the disaster," he said. "The analysis of this model has only just begun... It's going to have impacts for several years."
Contributing: Francisco Guzman, Paste BN