The most well-known shipwreck in the world has been made public in a never-before-seen way.
Deep-sea mapping has produced the first full-sized digital scan of the Titanic, which is located 3,800m (12,500ft) below the surface of the Atlantic.
It offers a distinctive 3D vision of the whole ship, allowing one to see it as though the water had been drained away.
It is hoped that this would provide fresh insight into the circumstances behind the liner’s sinking in 1912.
More than 1,500 people died when the ship struck an iceberg on its maiden voyage from Southampton to New York.
“There are still questions, basic questions, that need to be answered about the ship,” Parks Stephenson, a Titanic analyst, told BBC News.
He said the model was “one of the first major steps to driving the Titanic story towards evidence-based research – and not speculation.”
Since the wreck of the Titanic was discovered in 1985, it has been thoroughly investigated. But since it’s so big, cameras can only ever show us tantalizing fragments of the rotting ship in the darkness of the deep.
The new scan completely encompasses the site, giving a full perspective of the Titanic. The bow and stern are separated by around 800 meters (2,600 feet) on either side of it. The wrecked vessel is surrounded by a vast field of wreckage.
The deep-sea mapping company Magellan Ltd. and Atlantic Productions, who are producing a documentary on the project, conducted the scan in the summer of 2022.
Over 200 hours were spent remotely controlling submersibles from a team on board a specialized ship to explore the length of the ocean.
They took more than 700,000 images from every angle, creating an exact 3D reconstruction.