3D scan of Titanic sheds new light on doomed liner’s final moments

The Magellan team created a full-scale "digital twin" of Titanic. (Atlantic Productions/Magellan via CNN Newsource)

A new documentary reveals the incredible results of a project to create 3D underwater scans of the doomed ocean liner RMS Titanic, which sank 113 years ago.

“Titanic: The Digital Resurrection” tells the story of how deep-sea mapping company Magellan created “the most precise model of the Titanic ever created: a full-scale, 1:1 digital twin, accurate down to the rivet,” according to a statement from National Geographic, published Tuesday.

When Titanic set sail on April 10, 1912, she was the largest passenger ship in service and considered unsinkable.

Just four days later, Titanic’s maiden voyage became an international tragedy when she struck an iceberg in the North Atlantic at 11:40 p.m. April 14. She sank in less than three hours.

The ship did not have enough lifeboats for the approximately 2,220 people on board. More than 1,500 people died in the accident, and Titanic became the most famous shipwreck in history. There were just over 700 survivors.

The 90-minute National Geographic documentary allows filmmaker Anthony Geffen “to reconstruct the ship’s final moments—challenging long-held assumptions and revealing new insights into what truly happened on that fateful night in 1912,” according to the statement.

In the film, Titanic analyst Parks Stephenson, metallurgist Jennifer Hooper and master mariner Chris Hearn walk around a full-scale reproduction of the ship, highlighting previously hidden details.

One key finding is a visibly open steam valve, which corroborates accounts that engineers manned their stations in Boiler Room Two for more than two hours after Titanic hit the iceberg.

This maintained the electricity supply and allowed crew to send distress signals, meaning the 35 men in the boiler room may have sacrificed themselves to save hundreds of other people.

The team also reconstruct hull fragments found scattered around the site, revealing that Titanic didn’t split in two, but “was violently torn apart, ripping through first-class cabins where prominent passengers like J.J. Astor and Benjamin Guggenheim may have sought refuge as the ship went down.”

The scan also helps to exonerate First Officer William Murdoch, who has been accused of abandoning his post. The position of a lifeboat davit, a piece of equipment used to lower the craft, corroborates testimony that Murdoch was, in fact, washed out to sea as the crew prepared to launch it.

Magellan’s scans also reveal how parts of the wreck are collapsing, but National Geographic said the digital twin means “the Titanic is preserved in perfect detail as it appeared in 2022, securing its place in history for generations to come and marking a new era in underwater archaeology.”

By Jack Guy, CNN