After Exploring Shipwrecks Worldwide, I’ve Never Seen Anything as Mind-Blowing as Nat Geo’s Titanic ‘Digital Resurrection’

BY SEAN KINGSLEY

Robots Romeo and Juliet vanish under the icy waters of the Middle North Atlantic in a spray of sea foam. Destination: Titanic, the most famous shipwreck on the planet. The ocean is as flat as a swimming pool. Not an iceberg in sight.

Cameras and two manipulator arms are primed at the front of the remotely-operated vehicle robots, flown by the joystick of a pilot sat safely inside the Freja research ship. No human is at risk. Lights, cameras, no action — yet. Four hundred miles off Newfoundland, it’s a 2.5-hour commute to the 12,400-feet-deep silent seabed.

What Romeo and Juliet did next is showcased in National Geographic’s latest underwater adventure, Titanic: The Digital Resurrection. The scientific wizardry is the work of Magellan of Guernsey in the Channel Islands and filmed by the award-winning Atlantic Productions.

Between April 15, 1912, when the ship hit an iceberg while trying to break the England-to-New York speed record for an ocean liner, and now, Titanic’s always been an A-list attraction. In the ’80s, time-traveling dwarfs sipped cocktails on its sinking decks in Terry Gilliam’s Time Bandits. In the ’90s, Jim Cameron’s magical film that won 11 Academy Awards took the ship’s celebrity into the stratosphere.

From the surface back down to the seabed, Romeo and Juliet have switched on their strobe lights. They’re about to spend three weeks photographing the Titanic 24/7. Then, it’ll take two years to process 715,000 photos to build a full-sized digital replica of the Titanic and its huge debris field. The film calls the endeavor “the largest underwater scanning project in history.” But it’s more than that. It’s “a new gold standard,” marine archaeologist Professor Bridget Buxton, the first female lead scientist to the Titanic in a former expedition, told The Hollywood Reporter.

What’s been hailed as the first “virtual twin” of the wreck is mind-blowing. A state-of-the-art subsea imaging system designed by Voyis of Canada took photos lit up by half-a-million lumens of flash lighting. Over painstaking months, Magellan turned 16 terabytes of data into a life size digital model — accurate to about a centimeter — that viewers can fly through, walk on and rotate. The future has arrived.

All his life, Parks Stephenson has been trying to make sense of what happened to the Titanic on that fateful night in 1912. On-screen, he strides across a full size projection of the wreckage next to metallurgist Jennifer Hooper and Chris Hearn, reading forensic clues like David Attenborough reads the animal kingdom. “Hopefully, we’re going to get the answers to some of these questions that have been bugging me for decades,” he says.

Titanic: The Digital Resurrection is a feast for the senses, but Romeo and Juliet are in a horror movie this time. The wreck lies in two parts, one-third of a mile apart. Titanic isn’t frozen in time. Signs of violence are everywhere. Up close and personal, Stephenson and his team see how it’s been ripped apart — the guts of the ship, twisted sheets of metal and objects of daily life blown across a massive debris field. “You would think the ship had been struck by some enormous missile,” Hearn says.

To many, Titanic may look like a heap of rust. But what survives — in a bow the height of an eight-story building, where Jack (Leonardo DiCaprio) and Rose (Kate Winslet) romanced in the iconic “I’m flying” scene in Cameron’s Titanic — hides new evidence of the ship, passenger and crew’s final moments, the National Geographic documentary promises.

Titanic was famously built with 16 watertight compartments to contain floodwater in an emergency. It could stay afloat even if four of them flooded. The team calculates, using cutting-edge technology to simulate the iceberg strike of 1912, that the glancing blow lasted for 6.3 seconds. The rip impacted just 18 feet of the ship’s 882 feet.

Most of the damage wiped out four watertight compartments, into which 16,000 tons of water gushed, but unluckily the ice pierced two other compartments. “It all comes down to two small holes on either side of the badly damaged section,” Hooper says. “Without them, Titanic might not have sunk.”

By now, captain and crew knew that the ship of dreams was doomed. So, they pivoted to saving lives. Without power, the chances of survival were slim. Thirty-five engineers went down shoveling coal into the boilers to keep the deck lit where lifeboats were being launched and to keep the wireless room powered. If the Marconi telecommunications frazzled, the Carpathia would never have heard the Titanic’s SOS call.

The gaping cut across the bow, showing the boiler room where the engineers perished, is an astonishing sight in the film. “This is what’s left of the heart of Titanic,” Stephenson whispers. The horror the engineers went through lives on in the savagely-twisted wreckage.

Amidst the chaos, chief engineer Joseph Bell was thinking clearly. At the end of the wreck site, the team spots on the digital model the steam valve, its flap open. “This is a line that was taking the remaining steam from the boiler rooms to the emergency dynamos,” Hearn says. The valves fed the Titanic’s lighting, heating and ran the pumps. Bell had opened the pipe steam valve by hand, which kept the lights on two hours after Titanic hit the iceberg, saving hundreds of lives.

“There’s a lot of mysteries in the Titanic disaster,” Stephenson says — especially the enigma of whether the ocean liner gently slipped beneath the waves or, as some survivors claimed, broke apart before sinking. Stephenson thinks the answer lies in the debris field. The team flies upwards using the robot’s cameras for a “God’s-eye view of the debris field.”

In the chaos, the team digitally piece the hull back together. The broken sections turn out to come from 100 feet or more of the vertical side of the ship. Far from snapping neatly, a huge area was completely destroyed.

“It was a giant, catastrophic fracture,” Hooper says. “As the stresses are building up, you’ve got tension across the top, compression and buckling at the bottom of the ship, and slowly it turns into a domino effect.” Component after component failed in a fatal chain reaction. “Twenty percent of the ship just completely destroyed in probably a matter of seconds.”

So, the truth behind the final moments wasn’t a genteel scene of New York banker Benjamin Guggenheim (“If we have to die, we will die like gentlemen”) going down dressed in his Sunday best as the band played on. It was cataclysmic. “In Titanic, it didn’t matter what your status was, you would all meet the same fate,” Stephenson says.

Thankfully for mystery and conspiracy theory lovers, Titanic: The Digital Resurrection shares forensic best-fit guesstimates, not watertight facts. With three-quarters of the bow buried in mud, it’s impossible to see the exact spots where the iceberg sliced Titanic open. And because international agreements ban robots from entering the ship’s 3D superstructure, the jury’s still out about how the ship truly sank.

Banning access to the ghoulish inner guts of the wreck, as well as recovering objects to study, to many, is bizarre. It’s as if archaeologists never got to dig up Pompeii. No finds, no villas to enjoy.

That’s the reality for the Titanic. Look, don’t touch. Which makes the digital twin a tool of awe and frustration. There, untouched in the debris field, are opera glasses that might have belonged to theater owner, Henry B. Harris, who died in the sinking. A find straight out of the gossip pages is a pig’s tusk bangle spotted next to a megalodon shark’s tooth, millions of years old, a lucky charm once attached to a pocket watch decorated with an “Advance Australia” crest. The team tracked the find back to Scottish businessman Colonel John Wear.

“After his death, a family secret was revealed,” Oxford professor Yasmin Khan says in the film. “His Scottish wife had a nasty surprise when she made her claim to the estate because it turned out he had an Australian family who were making exactly the same claim.” Awkward.

“The observations may seem inconsequential — an open valve on the deck, a concave boiler, an upright davit, but these small observations are all critical to the narrative of the sinking,” Buxton told THR, “and our understanding of the last moments of individual heroes, in some cases people who have been wrongly vilified in the historical record. No one lost that night chose to have their lives turned into media commodities… If we owe the dead of Titanic anything at all, we owe them the truth.”

And the 3D digital twin’s existence doesn’t mean the exploration should now stop. There are truths to prove and fake news to spike.

Against the backdrop of films and books, a battle for the fate of the Titanic is raging. Many heritage groups want the ship to be left alone — forever. They call the wreck (as does Titanic: The Digital Resurrection) — a graveyard for the 1,500 people who died in the sinking. In The Secrets of the Titanic. Diving the Most Famous Wreck in History, written after he tragically perished in the Titan submersible dive to the wreck, the French explorer Paul-Henri Nargeolet, known as Mr. Titanic because he’d dived the wreck more times than any human, called the graveyard angle a “clever PR stunt.”

Most of the Titanic’s passengers and crew didn’t drown inside the wreck, Nargeolet points out, but died of hypothermia in the 100 minutes before the Carpathia found a sea of floating corpses. The sad reality is that after so many years underwater, most human bones dissolved in the acidic seawater.

The archaeological riches in the Titanic’s debris field are an unopened encyclopedia. Among the 15,000 to 20,000 artifacts waiting to be explored is a copy of the Omar Khayyam studded with 1,500 emeralds, rubies, amethysts and topazes set in gold, the trunks of first-class passengers and perhaps the greatest treasure of all: 3,364 bags of mail stuffed with seven million letters. Silent voices of the late Edwardian age filled with thousands of stories of life about to be turned upside-down by World War I.

The debris field’s vast unseen mysteries can’t be touched, but are being shared in Magellan’s new must-see video game, vROVpilot: Titanic. Everyone from scientists to the public can explore the seabed through the eyes of an ROV robot’s pilot to discover the treasures for themselves.

Beyond Titanic: The Digital Resurrection, there’s a burning reason to push the boundaries to still explore. Rusticles up to 29 feet long hanging off the ship’s sides are making the Titanic melt back into the earth from where it came.

DNA analysis of the rusticles shows they’re made up of 27 strains of bacteria thought to be eating about 180 kilograms of iron a day. The Titanic’s 3D structure may collapse within 15 to 50 years, researchers predict. To many, mapping Titanic and saving its finds is a race against time.

James Sinclair, the first archaeologist to dive to the Titanic‘s final resting place via submersible in 2000, effectively started the stopwatch.

“If we care about preserving this great ship, the documentation, such as Magellan’s 3D work featured by National Geographic, is so very important,” Sinclair told THR, “but so is the recovery of important items that hold either academic or emotional places in human consciousness. I don’t think it’s a question that can linger and should be done sooner rather than later.”

“The clock is ticking on this great shipwreck and its artifacts,” he said. “I understand that it’s a memorial to those who perished, but I also think that collections of artifacts tell a much better story than what over time will be a rusty stain in the deep, cold ocean.”

source : hollywoodreporter