The Titanic Was Sunk By a Few Small Holes

RMS Titanic was touted as the unsinkable ship, in part due to its innovative design. But, sadly some of those new designs hadn’t been tested in real life situations and would prove fatal when they failed on her maiden voyage across the Atlantic Ocean on April 15, 1912 as she approached New York. Now, new imaging of the wreckage has given a much more comprehensive look at the damage that the steamship sustained when it collided with the iceberg. And, as it turns out, some pretty small holes may have been what sank the ship in the end.

The new 3D scans of the wreckage were created using sonar from Magellan, a type of deep sea mapping that compiled more than 715,000 images of the ship from every angle to create a full view of the wreckage before it decomposes further. The wreckage lies off the coast of Newfoundland.

Researchers with Magellan saw details that were not clearly visible before, like open champagne bottles, shoes from passengers, and individual rivets and serial numbers on parts. They are calling it the Titanic Twin because it mirrors the wreckage to a high degree of accuracy. The scanning took a year and when hooked up to projectors and a scanning camera, the images can be presented life-sized with moving perspective as if you were walking on the ocean floor staring at the downed ship. The images have been used to create a new documentary about the wreckage.

The working theory on how the ship was sunk proposes that the ship was tilted to one side which caused it to twist as it rapidly sunk. This twisting caused the back half of the ship (the stern) to split from the front completely and come apart, showering debris across the ocean floor in a 3-mile radius as it went down. This the same section of the ship that took on those “minor” holes to the below-decks compartments.

In the newest 3D scans of the ship you can see the twisted metal where the ship split apart as it was sank to the ocean floor with great force.

The boat was fitted with 16 compartments along the bottom. It was designed so that if up to 4 of these compartments took on water the ship would still stay afloat. But, when the ship scraped across the massive iceberg, the ice tore holes along 6 of the compartments. 4 of the chambers filled up with water almost immediately.

The bottom of the ship was also fitted with an extra layer of metal to help stop prevent damage to the bottom of the ship, but it was little defense when the torsion of the ship tore the Titanic in half.

The crew and passengers aboard that ill-fated ship might have had more time to escape had the iceberg not also torn much smaller holes in the 2 other compartments. According to National Geographic these smaller holes were only the size of a sheet of notebook paper or smaller, meaning that these relatively tiny tears were the straw that broke the camel’s back. These smaller injuries to the hull put the load of incoming water above the threshold of what the Titanic was designed to withstand.

You can see some of the 3D images of the shipwreck in the video below.