Incredible 3D scans of the Titanic wreckage.
bbc.com/news/science-environment-65602182
bbc.comPosted May 17, 2023, 5:25 AM UTC
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bbc.comWow, this is incredible.
It probably won't be long until we can put these into a game engine and hover around the wreck ourselves.
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There is actually a game like that already, called Titanic Shipwreck Exploration, but ofc, that one was made the old fashioned way with modeling everything by hand. It's a very cool game tho, you can dive the bow and the stern too and venture quite far inside them, and it even has a little story mode where you can even experience the sinking from lifeboat 6 and then in the present day, dive the wreck with tasks like placing plaques on the wreck or retrieving artifacts for the relatives of passengers
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Would be great to update that game with this
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Or 3d print a high accuracy model
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Its also crazy to think this wreck has laid in exactly this same spot in total darkness while all the other dramatic events of recent history occurred. The revolution in Russia, WW1, transitions through several different British monarchs, WW2, the nuclear age, the jet age, space age, Korea, Vietnam, SA Apartheid, Civil Rights, etc etc. All the while, here it sits. Frozen in time.
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Amazing. Though I'd love to know how she looked a mere year or so after she sunk.
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I’ve always wondered this as well
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I've wondered this and sort of thought the images of the Edmund Fitzgerald would be comparable.
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I wanna explore the scans :( I can't find a link anywhere
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Same! I’d love to see the champagne bottles and shoes they talk about.
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I want to see them as well, read the article looking for it. If someone finds it can you link it? Unless that won’t be available.
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Looks like they themselves are making a documentary.
The scan was carried out in the summer 2022 by Magellan Ltd, a deep-sea mapping company, and Atlantic Productions, who are making a documentary about the project.
All for new documentary though!
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Ah that seems likely. Too bad, I would have loved to spend a few hours of my time just looking around.
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Same, is there any in the first place?
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God, I hope they release it as a publicly available model in the near future. I'd pay for that, for sure.
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OMG, anyone know how we get access to that model?
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First ever full-sized scans reveal wreck as never seen before
Unless you've seen Ken Marschall's work. AND his paintings are way more beautiful to look at, though these 3D scans are still cool as hell. Can't believe they picked up the ship number on the propeller blade.
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Indeed, the fidelity of the scan is pretty stunning. My favorite shot is the rusticles under the stern, but it's all mindblowing. I had to play it back at half speed just to give it time to sink in.
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And yet there will still be people clinging to the theory that Titanic and Olympic were switched despite the number being on that blade...
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It's the perfect crime!
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20 years ago, I received a Titanic child book with drawn pictures from Ken Marshall where he actually painted/drawed the bow based on the stories of people who have been diving to the wreck. It looked magical. And all those years later, his own footage turned out to be almost 100% accurate, compared to the footage we see right now. Absolutely incredible!
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I wish I could ask him about some of his paintings from the 80s and exactly what he had photographic sources for and what was embellished.
The stern is way more collapsed and deteriorated than he depicted.
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“We really don't understand the character of the collision with the iceberg. We don't even know if she hit it along the starboard side, as is shown in all the movies - she might have grounded on the iceberg”
I never heard of the grounding theory until now.
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I feel like that quote either had to be wildly out of context or something else is off there (not out of context from you - the BBC used it in the article and their video). You can see a bit of the iceberg damage on the wreck where the rivets popped out between boiler room's 5 and 6, along the starboard side.
The model as presented also seems to just be made from lots and lots of pictures of the wreck. This would, indeed, offer a high-resolution model of what we can see on the wreck. ...But it's not going to give us any sort of idea on what the wreck looks like in areas covered by mud, or that are otherwise inaccessible due to being covered by the rest of the wreck. The bottom of the hull shouldn't be visible, then, and it'd then follow that you'd not be able to determine there was any grounding damage at all (since you'd need enough data on how the hull is currently shaped to kind of figure out how much damage was caused by the impact with the seafloor and which deformations were caused by an impact with the iceberg, since I'd imagine that the ship's bottom is probably pretty messed up under the mud there). This doesn't provide any data, at all, of what the bottom of the ship looks like - so any theories on grounding would be purely speculative. (This was kind of a point that set me off because the way the BBC cut their video version of this suggested the opposite).
There is a possibility of damage to the bottom of the ship because there's questions on when boiler room 4 started to flood - and whether flooding came from under it - though this isn't really all that well established. It would suggest grounding, though.
..But again, this model doesn't seem to be able to show that area of the hull, so it just wouldn't really do much for it. It'd be like trying to determine the root system of a tree with a particularly detailed image of the trunk. You could probably find out a lot of really cool things about the trunk. Roots though? No.
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The grounding theory doesn't work with *any* survivor testimony though, does it?
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A few in the boiler rooms reported water coming up from below. Seaman Edward Burley for example testified to the Senate that “…according to where the water was, I should say the bottom was really ripped open altogether.”
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Interesting.
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There's a sketch done by a survivor on the wikipedia page that shows the ship hitting the iceberg and it looks like it's grounding on it.
It also shows the bow bobbing to the surface again for a bit after the ship breaks in half.
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Wow. What an amazing project. I think this image will put that silly Olympic/Titanic switch theory to bed forever.
401 on the propeller. (Image 7 of 8 on BBC)
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If they are dumb enough to believe it. Concrete proof won't save them
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Ha! Exactly! "How do we know the scanning company didn't put 401 on the propeller blade in photoshop?"
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Exactly what I said!
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While I agree that the switch theory is completely bogus, this propeller is actually the only valid piece of evidence that doesn’t disprove it. After the collision with the Hawke, Olympic's starboard prop was replaced with the one meant for Titanic, so both ships would have had 401 stamped into that blade at the time of the sinking.
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Always knew the stern was in a poor state but it seems much worse here.
It does settle the fairly constant question about why dive teams never seem to visit the stern, it's essentially just a pancaked pile of scrap metal with no real form of the ship it belonged to. The vast majority of the rooms / corridors are clearly gone and most of the exterior is totally destroyed.
There's nothing of any real interest left and considering the astronomical costs of getting down there, it's no real surprise why the bow is always the chosen location to dive. Least the bow still resembles something related to Titanic.
You can only really see the stern being from Titanic because you are viewing an illuminated scan. If you were actually down there in a sub, it would probably be like trying to navigate a scrapyard in the middle of the night with a torch. It's just a mess with minimal notable features to make the journey worthwhile.
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Haunting.
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These are absolutely amazing. Now do Britannic, Lusitania, Empress of Ireland, Andrea Doria, ect
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I really hope this technology gets applied to other wrecks. This is such an enormously valuable historical resource.
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USS Yorktown (CV-5)!
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Wish they spent more time on the debris field! There's stuff EVERYWHERE to look at. Wow so nice to see it so clearly though
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The world needs this in VR. Get on it, people!
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I’ll riot if they don’t make this publicly accessible with or without a fee.
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Clearly Dr. Ballard went down there and etched 401 on the prop to muddy the waters in the switch theory, but I can see through it! /s
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Wow, this is breathtaking, I guess I never quite realized how much expansion joint backward has already collapsed in on itself from the boat deck to a deck. The stern is absolutely more demolished than I ever thought it looked like in recent years. I do wonder how much longer we have the A-Deck prom since the forward openings near the bridge don't look that much far behind the rear.
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Incredible work they have done. If worked in scanning before this would've been a ton of work a ton of data.
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In the picture above you can clearly see the white paint and the black of the hull with a large patch where it looks like the paint is flaking away just forward of the anchor. I’m surprised at the relatively good condition of the paintwork.
Do you think this is an accurate colour? I know most of the footage is affected by the colour of the water.
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Much of Titanic's paint is still visible today, there's parts of the wreck where you can see the white paint of the superstructure and the pinkish red anti-fouling. I'd say the colouring of this 3D render is pretty accurate as far as I can tell.
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It’s incredible that we can still make out some of the paint on the hull, even after over 110 years of it slowly decaying below the frigid Atlantic
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Wow. I mean, I knew the stern was destroyed, but something about this really brought the scale of destruction to me in a way I hadn’t appreciated before.
It really is as accurate as when explorers have described it as looking like a plane crash.
same, seeing it all so clearly... she's still so beautiful though and continues to endure 😭
This is the best documentation of the stern's condition to date, even better than the side-view collages from 10 years ago or so.
The tops of the engines are literally the highest point on the stern section.
Has the clip on the site changed? I may have had my sleepy eyes on this morning but I could have sworn there was slow pass above the strern where you could see the devastation?
I also am having this issue where I can't find the shot of the stern that moved from an overhead to a different angle, really conveying the sense of devastation. It literally made my jaw drop when I saw it, and now that shot is missing. The only stern shot this morning (aside from the zoom in on the prop) is the starboard side profile, which is still cool but you don't get the same view. Maybe there was a flaw or inaccuracy with that particular shot, I'm not sure.
Not just me then. We know the stern was bad, but my god it’s really bad and like you my jaw dropped when I saw that
Looks like someone else in this thread linked a much longer video - hope you find the shot!
You can find it in the full BBC news video.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R2XtefrMNhg&ab_channel=BBCNews
The full shot is at 5:30.
Thank you
Was thinking this too! Unless this is our Mandela effect moment.
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