"Unseen Titanic"
At 2:20 a.m. on April 15, 1912, the “unsinkable” R.M.S. Titanic
disappeared beneath the waves, taking with her 1,500 souls. One hundred
years later, new technologies have revealed the most complete—and most
intimate—images of the famous wreck.
More than two miles down, the ghostly bow of the Titanic emerges
from the darkness on a dive by explorer and filmmaker James Cameron in
2001. The ship might have survived a head-on collision with an iceberg,
but a sideswipe across her starboard side pierced too many of her
watertight compartments.
The propellers of the Olympic—the nearly identical sister ship of the Titanic—dwarf workers at the Belfast shipyard where both ocean liners were built. Few photographs exist of the Titanic, but the Olympic gives a sense of its grand design.
With her rudder cleaving the sand and two propeller blades peeking from the murk, Titanic’s
mangled stern rests on the abyssal plain, 1,970 feet south of the more
photographed bow. This optical mosaic combines 300 high-resolution
images taken on a 2010 expedition.
Ethereal views of Titanic’s bow offer a comprehensiveness of detail never seen before. The optical mosaics each consist of 1,500 high-resolution images rectified using sonar data.
As the starboard profile shows, the Titanic buckled as it plowed nose-first into the seabed, leaving the forward hull buried deep in mud—obscuring, possibly forever, the mortal wounds inflicted by the iceberg.
Titanic’s battered stern, captured here in profile, bears witness
to the extreme trauma inflicted upon it as it corkscre
Two of Titanic’s engines lie exposed in a gaping cross section of
the stern. Draped in “rusticles”—orange stalactites created by
iron-eating bacteria—these massive structures, four stories tall, once
powered the largest moving man-made object on Earth.
wed to the
bottom.
0 comments:
Post a Comment