By: Parisa Yan

The Titanic said to be unsinkable when it was made, capsized on its first voyage from Southampton, England to New York, USA. It has been underwater for over 100 years, but little is known about how the collision actually happened. It was the largest ship ever built at the time it sailed, and held 2,200 passengers and crew. Of those 2,200 passengers, only around 700 survived the crash.

“We really don’t understand the character of the collision with the iceberg. We don’t even know if she hit it along the starboard side, as is shown in all the movies – she might have grounded on the iceberg,” Parks Stephenson, a Titanic analyst, explained.

A team from Magellan Ltd, a deep-sea mapping company, spent more than 200 hours surveying the wreck from a specialist ship while piloting remote-controlled submersibles. They created a full-sized 3D view of the ship. The submersibles took more than 700,000 pictures at every angle to create the precise 3D model of the ship.

An international team of deep-sea explorers surveyed the sunken ship 3,800 meters under the Atlantic Ocean. They saw that some parts were in surprisingly good condition while other parts had decayed and returned to nature. The worst decay was on the starboard side of the officers’ headquarters, the result of strong ocean currents, salt corrosion, and metal-eating bacteria.

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