As April 14, 2025 marked 114 years of the Titanic tragedy, a new documentary, titled Titanic: The Digital Resurrection has brought forward new details about the ship in its final moments of sinking. The National Geographic documentary, which is now available on Disney+, uses the first-ever full-sized 3D scan to study the wreckage of Titanic.
The 3D scan essentially provided a digital twin of the ship which showed that even in the moments that the ship was sinking, some of the boilers were concave. These boilers produced steam that powered a number of the ship’s basic functions and the fact that they were still running when the ship went under the water validates the eye witness’ accounts of how the engineers were shoveling coal into the ship’s furnaces so the lights could remain on for as long as possible as passengers escaped.
Parks Stephenson, a Titanic analyst, told BBC, “They kept the lights and the power working to the end, to give the crew time to launch the lifeboats safely with some light instead of in absolute darkness.” Unfortunately, none of the engineers survived, as mentioned by Stephenson.
The reason that the apparently unsinkable Titanic sank has been explained by Simon Benson, associate lecturer in naval architecture, as he told BBC, “The difference between Titanic sinking and not sinking are down to the fine margins of holes about the size of a piece of paper. But the problem is that those small holes are across a long length of the ship, 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.”
It should be noted here that the crew members had suffered the worst in the Titanic tragedy as around 700 crew people lost their lives. Passengers on the third class also lost their lives in huge numbers as only 174 among approximately 710 people survived. Despite such a huge number of people going under water, their remains can’t be found near the Titanic wreckage.
The reason behind this was explained by former Naval Reserve commanding officer Ballard to NPR back in 2009 as he said, “The issue you have to deal with is, at depths below about 3,000 feet (around 914 metres), you pass below what’s called the calcium carbonate compensation depth.”
He added, “And the water in the deep sea is under saturated in calcium carbonate, which is mostly, you know, what bones are made of. For example, on the Titanic and on the Bismarck, those ships are below the calcium carbonate compensation depth, so once the critters eat their flesh and expose the bones, the bones dissolve.”
The 3D model that the documentary shows has been mapped using underwater robots and consists of about 700,000 images of the wreckage taken from every angle, which makes the viewing experience exhilarating.
Titanic: The Digital Resurrection can be streamed on Disney+ and Hulu.
