Titanic's tragic final moments revealed 113 years later in groundbreaking 3D scans
Holes the size of a small piece of paper led to the ships demise
Stunning new 3D scans reveal the Titanic's final moments in stunning detail.
It's been more than a century since the Titanic struck an iceberg in the North Atlantic Ocean, leading to the ship's sinking and over 1,500 deaths.
Now, experts at deep-sea mapping company Magellan Ltd have captured new angles of the famous shipwreck from around 12,500 feet below the ocean's surface.
The high-res digital scans offer a whole new look at the ship’s remains. One view is the boiler room where the ship broke in two. Some of the boilers appear concave, suggesting they were still running when the ship was sinking.
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Another revealing detail is the punctures in the hull, which are 'the size of A4 pieces of paper.' According to the researchers, these holes allowed water to flow into multiple compartments, leading to the vessel's tragic fate.
Interestingly, researchers say the ship didn’t crash head-on into the iceberg, rather, it made a 'glancing blow,' noted research leader Jeom-Kee Paik at University College London.
"Those small holes are across a long length of the ship," Simon Benson, naval architect at the University of Newcastle explained. "So the flood water comes in slowly but surely into all of those holes, and then eventually the compartments are flooded over the top and the Titanic sinks."
Another powerful finding from the scans was a steam valve stuck in the open position, meaning that steam was still flowing into Titanic's electricity-generating system. This tiny detail backs up survivor reports that Titanic’s engineers kept working until the very end, doing everything they could to keep the ship's lights on while passengers scrambled for lifeboats.
The team led by Cumbria-born engineer Joseph Bell worked to shovel coal into the furnaces to keep the lights on as the ship was going under.
Their selfless actions gave the crew extra time to lower the lifeboats - likely saving many lives, Titanic analyst Parks Stephenson said.
"They held the chaos at bay as long as possible, and all of that was kind of symbolised by this open steam valve just sitting there on the stern," he added.
These discoveries are part of a new National Geographic and Atlantic Productions documentary titled Titanic: The Digital Resurrection.
"Titanic is the last surviving eyewitness to the disaster, and she still has stories to tell," Stephenson stated. "Having a comprehensive view of the entirety of the wreck site is key to understanding what happened here."
The project follows up on Magellan Ltd’s earlier scans from two years ago, which produced the first full 3D reconstruction of the wreck site.