Researchers Release 8K Footage of the Decaying Titanic

The RMS Titanic’s bow. (Photo: OceanGate Expeditions) The sinking of the RMS Titanic has managed to remain in the public conscience for more than a century. Between James Cameron’s Titanic and various traveling artifact exhibitions (not to mention countless “Jack could have fit on the door” analyses), this North Atlantic tragedy has been romanticized, meme-ified, and studied across multiple generations. As for the latter, we now have extra fodder to do just that.

New 8K footage reveals previously uncaptured details of the sunken ship in all its haunting glory. OceanGate Expeditions, a company that specializes in using submersible vessels to “explore and document” the seafloor, conducted an undersea Titanic visit earlier this year. Its crew, which included six citizen explorers, used a submersible called Titan to reach the ship. With room for up to five occupants, the titanium and carbon fiber submersible is the only vessel in the world capable of reaching 4,000 meters (or 2.5 miles) undersea.

The crew’s visit (and the resulting video) offered unprecedented visibility into the Titanic’s architecture. For the first time, the crew was able to make out the words “Noah Hingley & Sons Ltd” on the ship’s portside anchor—a detail Titanic scholar and expedition veteran Rory Golden, who was part of the expedition, had never witnessed before. The crane used to lift the massive 15-ton anchor still resting on the deck can be seen early on in the video, which OceanGate shared on YouTube late last month. The second half of the video reveals three round structures, which Titanic diver and crew member PH Nargeolet says were used to feed the docking ropes to shore when the ship was at port. Perhaps the most gripping part of the crew’s 8K video is toward the beginning, when the Titanic’s decaying rail can be seen leaning away from the ship.

Every now and then a pair of green lights appears in the video. These are lasers spaced 10 centimeters apart, which are used to measure the size of objects viewed on-camera and through the Titan’s viewport. Stockton Rush, OceanGate’s president, says this technology—combined with the 8K video and the collaboration of multiple Titanic enthusiasts—will help its own scientists and maritime archaeologists study the ship’s decay more accurately. There’s no doubt the video will inspire a new era of Titanic scholars as well.

Thanks to the success of the company’s 2022 expedition, OceanGate is already working toward organizing a 2023 Titanic visit.

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