Ever since I first watched Titanic as a child, I dreamed of exploring the ocean depths and examining the famous shipwreck. Thanks to its first-ever first full-sized digital scan, I’ve now come as close to it as possible.

Magellan Ltd and Atlantic Productions teamed up and created an impressively detailed scan of the Titanic shipwreck. Using deep-sea mapping, they managed to show us the once glorious ship in such detail that you can even see a serial number on a propeller!

Magellan Ltd is a deep-sea mapping company that performed the scan in the summer of 2022. They presented it to the public along with Atlantic Productions, a company making a documentary about the project.

The Titanic shipwreck lies 3,800m (12,500ft) down in the Atlantic. The ship sunk in 1912 after hitting an iceberg, and the wreck was discovered in 1985. It has been extensively explored since then, but since it’s so dark down in the deep, the cameras could never capture it as it deserved.

Magellan Ltd used submersible gear for deep-sea mapping, controlled remotely by a team on board a specialist ship. They spent over 200 hours thoroughly examining every inch of the wreck. The team took over half a million images for the project, more than 700,000! They were taken from every possible angle, creating an exact, and incredibly eerie, 3D reconstruction.

My favorite parts of the 3D tour are the bow, still instantly recognizable even 111 years after the shipwreck; and the propeller captured in such detail that you can see its serial number. Those almost made me cry.

Other than being absolutely stunning to watch, the 3D tour of the Titanic shipwreck could provide historians with some new knowledge on exactly what happened to the ship. “There are still questions, basic questions, that need to be answered about the ship,” a Titanic analyst Parks Stephenson told BBC News. “[This project] was one of the first major steps to driving the Titanic story towards evidence-based research – and not speculation.”

[via BBC News]