Original subtitles

NARRATOR: For a century, the Titanic has been hidden in darkness...

two-and-a-half miles down, at the bottom of the Atlantic.

But now a new investigation is about to drain the ocean...

pull the plug of the Atlantic and reveal the wreck.

The Titanic as she's never been seen before.

And in the bright light of day,

we uncover critical new pieces of evidence not previously visible...

from giant gouges on the ocean floor

to damage from the iceberg that sliced her open.

A team of scientists equipped with cutting-edge tools

now tackle the long-standing mysteries of the disaster

that could rewrite the Titanic's story.

Drained dry...

this is the wreck of the Titanic as you've never seen it before.

[metal creaking]

It's the most infamous ship in all history,

the Titanic.

From a time when ocean liners are racing to be

the biggest, the fastest, and the best...

the RMS Titanic is a technological marvel.

When she sets sail in 1912,

she's the largest moving man-made object on the planet.

An unsinkable ship.

But around 2,500 miles into her maiden voyage,

disaster.

[loud scraping]

1,500 passengers and crew dragged down to the icy depths.

And over a century later, we still don't know

exactly what happened that night.

How she sank and broke apart.

Hundreds of passengers and crew witnessed the tragedy

and lived to tell the tale.

Yet, despite this, there remain countless unanswered questions.

KENNETH VRANA: We have lots of historical information,

but often there are biases in those historical accounts.

Even the eyewitnesses of the sinking of Titanic

had many different perceptions of how that sinking took place.

So the best way to unravel some of those questions

is to use science.

NARRATOR: Explorers first discovered the Titanic's wreckage in September 1985.

BOB BALLARD: The boiler! Yeah!

[laughing and cheering]

NARRATOR: Since then, more than 20 expeditions have gone back to the ship.

Two-and-a-half miles down,

this is a place as alien as the surface of the moon.

Only a few yards of the Titanic's hull are visible

in the explorer's headlights at any one time.

Nobody's ever been able to see the whole wreck

or even find the edges of the site.

In the past, trying to understand Titanic with the existing technology

was like trying to draw a map of downtown Manhattan

from the height of a ten-story building

in a vehicle that has the windows fogged up.

It's pitch black and you're trying to look at it through a flashlight.

Challenging, to say the least.

NARRATOR: Critical clues to understanding the disaster

still lurk in this darkness.

Now, a team of scientists funded by the legal steward of the wreck,

RMS Titanic, Inc.,

are set to change all that

and bring the Titanic into the clear light of day for the first time.

An epic high-tech investigation

to discover exactly how and why she sank...

the Titanic Mapping Project.

The mission, use cutting-edge sonar mapping technology

to scan every part of the wreck.

And build a precise digital model of the Titanic...

as she sits on the ocean floor.

Their data will allow us to virtually peel back the sea.

[whooshing]

Strip away trillions of gallons of the Atlantic Ocean

and two-and-a-half miles down

reveal the unsinkable Titanic...

drained dry on the ocean floor.

But scanning the deep ocean isn't easy.

Autonomous underwater vehicles, AUVs,

have to dive down through 12,000 feet of water.

It's incredibly challenging to work at Titanic.

It's dangerous. It's a very dangerous place.

NARRATOR: Investigators program the AUVs

to fly as close as 30 feet above the wreck.

The underwater drones then fire signals,

measuring variations in height down to the tiniest detail.

They crisscross the wreck and seabed

like mowing a gigantic lawn.

Each pass scans a 150-foot wide strip,

gathering millions of data points.

Next, the team deploys an ROV,

a remote-controlled sub attached by cable,

to capture thousands of digital images of every point on the wreck.

GALLO: Every single day these vehicles would come back

with some new bit of information about what was on the bottom.

NARRATOR: A tidal wave of new data comes to the surface.

Over 160 hours of video.

In total, 37 terabytes of data.

But to see what they've got takes time.

Over the next weeks, banks of computers crunch the raw data,

turning millions of sonar points into a complex model of the wreck.

ROBERT GOODWIN: I remember all of us sort of sitting around the computer

when we first were building the 3-D layer

and seeing the bow and seeing the stern in so much detail.

We were all sort of grinning at the screen.

Looking at all that data and seeing that for the first time

was pretty amazing.

NARRATOR: At the same time,

visualization expert Bill Lange begins stitching together

thousands of individual images of the wreck...

a task that takes him and his team at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution

six months to complete.

LANGE: It was a very long and tedious process.

There were over 200 other mosaics that were done

for site interpretation and feature archaeological work.

NARRATOR: This ultra high-def imagery,

together with the 3-D scan...

can now unlock a new vision of the Titanic,

a wreck that's been shrouded in darkness

for over a century.

It's been four years in the making.

But now...

we can strip bare an extraordinary landscape...

pull the plug from the Atlantic.

Two-and-a-half miles down...

giant walls of steel tower into the sky.

Sunlight hits her decks once more

and countless clues to the disaster start to emerge.

This is...

the drained wreck...

of the Titanic.

NARRATOR: We've drained the Titanic...

and for the first time

we can see the ship in its entirety...

in unprecedented detail.

Now investigators can map out the site's boundaries.

And archaeologists can get an overview of a wreck

that's been hidden for over 100 years.

GALLO: It's almost like the fog has been cleared away.

We can now start to see through the perpetual darkness.

VRANA: The idea of draining the Titanic

presents the site in a whole different light.

It's not impenetrable.

It's right there in front of us to explore.

NARRATOR: The Titanic's wreckage is spread out

over half a square mile of the exposed ocean floor.

An area of some 200 football fields.

The site of RMS Titanic,

it can be described pretty basically as two large features.

The bow section and the stern section...

which are about a half a mile apart,

and then numerous debris fields.

NARRATOR: In all, there are five debris fields,

each scattered with fragments of the ship

and objects that tumbled out as she sank.

The stunning vistas unleashed by the new model

bring the Titanic back to life.

With the water stripped away, her story is laid out in plain sight.

GALLO: People think science is above emotion.

You know, when you're looking at the boat deck

where you know so many people said goodbye to one another,

these are important points on that ship.

NARRATOR: The guard rails, where on that freezing night

fathers hugged their children,

set them in the lowering lifeboats...

and leaned out to catch a final glimpse of their loved ones.

Portholes where passengers trapped below deck

saw the starry sky for the last time

as the ship slipped beneath the waves.

And even the mast of the crow's nest,

where lookout Frederick Fleet's voice shattered the silence of the night

as he first spotted the looming iceberg.

The Titanic's iconic eight-ton anchors,

still in place,

gleam in the bright daylight for the first time

in over a century.

And with the ocean now sucked dry,

her enormous bow section towers above the seabed.

Despite the violence of the sinking and all that time on the bottom,

what's inside that bow, in particular,

is still a ghostly sense of the ship that was.

NARRATOR: Inside the bow were many of the most luxurious

of the ship's features.

The grand staircase running the height of five decks.

The heated swimming pool reserved for first-class passengers only.

And a state-of-the-art gym

positioned right up on the boat deck.

The model reveals just how intact this section of the ship really is.

Embedded in the exposed ocean floor, almost perfectly upright,

the ghostly shell of the Titanic seems to be sailing across the seabed,

her prow parting the mud almost like water.

With 40 feet of the bow above the ocean floor,

a full 60 feet must be buried.

Equivalent to a six-story building.

Using the depth to which it carved into the seabed,

investigators are refining their calculations

of the impact speed.

Its descent was very smooth.

It had its aerodynamic nose facing into the direction of travel...

so there was no tumbling.

It was not particularly violent until the very last moment.

NARRATOR: Once separated from the rest of the ship,

the bow sank first at about 35 miles per hour

at an angle of 15 to 30 degrees.

Its impact with the sea floor

was like a gigantic 28,000-ton truck slamming into a snowdrift.

SAUDER: When the bow finally reached the bottom,

it plowed into the dirt almost all the way up to the anchors.

NARRATOR: With the darkness of the deep drained away,

it's crystal clear.

Here the impact is frozen in time.

The investigation is still probing the data,

hoping to learn more about how the bow reached the bottom.

And the fact that the bow's intact

means that they can also examine the most iconic mystery of the Titanic,

the iceberg impact.

The official 1912 accident report seems to suggest

the iceberg tore a gigantic 300-foot gash in the ship's right-hand side,

ripping open over a third of her entire hull.

However, eyewitness records prove the Titanic

took around two and a half hours to sink.

Investigators are puzzled.

A 300-foot hole would surely have sunk the Titanic

in a matter of minutes.

Oceanic explorer P.H. Nargeolet

has made 30 trips 12,000 feet down to the Titanic.

But he's never seen a 300-foot gash.

We were trying to find where the Titanic hit the iceberg,

why it was like that, why we saw some crack,

why there is a crack here and not here?

NARRATOR: Nargeolet and the team now turn

to the ultra high-resolution photo mosaics of the wreckage

to see what evidence there might be.

This profile view of the bow is stitched together

from over 3,000 individual images.

LANGE: The profile mosaics show Titanic

in a way that people hadn't seen it before.

No one had done a profile view of Titanic's bow

in the 25 years that people had been going to Titanic.

NARRATOR: Here again, even with these pin-sharp images,

they find no sign of anything approaching a 300-foot tear in the hull.

However, when they turn to the video footage,

investigators can see much smaller areas of impact damage.

GALLO: The actual iceberg damage appears to be

confined to maybe a 30-foot length of the bow.

It wasn't like a gash and it wasn't tens of small gashes.

NARRATOR: The size of these gaps in the hull

add up to just 11 square feet.

A breach this size would allow 370 gallons of seawater

to gush in every second.

And when they analyze how quickly this would have sunk the Titanic,

it turns out to be two and a half hours.

Exactly the time the ship actually took to sink.

An enduring mystery is solved.

The investigations further confirmed

that the giant gash is fiction.

And that the iceberg made only small punctures below the waterline

that together were enough to trigger disaster.

But for the team, there's an even bigger question looming

that our new model could shed light on.

When and where did the ship get torn in half?

How did her bow become separated from her stern

by a staggering 2,000 feet?

The answer is here, in broad daylight, on the drained sea floor

in the exposed wreck of the Titanic.

NARRATOR: We're peeling back the Atlantic Ocean,

draining its waters to reveal the wreckage of the Titanic.

This is what the ship looks like today

without two-and-a-half miles of pitch-black ocean

blocking out the sun.

2,000 feet beyond the massive bow section,

in the heart of the debris fields,

lies the dismembered stern,

the back end of the ship.

It's the second largest fragment,

392 feet long.

But it's immediately obvious it's in very different condition to the bow.

The stern is a mess. It looks like it's been ripped up like confetti.

The stern today is pure chaos.

NARRATOR: Some of the stern's huge metal components are still intact,

like the 40-foot-high engines, each the size of a large house.

But our highly detailed model also shows decks collapsing,

as if crushed together.

Heavy steel beams twisted and torn like straws.

GALLO: It's hard to figure out what you're looking at.

To me it almost looks like giant pieces of metal sitting on the sea floor,

but tough to make it out as a piece of a ship.

NARRATOR: Why is it in such bad condition?

Investigators have struggled to fully explain this.

The stern section has its problems in interpretation

because it's so completely broken up.

NARRATOR: But within the model there's a vital clue.

Something that could unlock the stern's violent story.

On the acoustic map you can see that the stern

was turning counter clock.

NARRATOR: It's a massive mark carved into the seabed

when the stern made impact.

Scientists can now read the tracks

and interpret how the stern impacted the sea floor.

NARGEOLET:You can see very well when the stern hit the bottom,

the stern was still turning.

And you can see the bottom of the ship on port side

showing that the stern was turning in same time.

NARRATOR: The marks allow investigators to work out

the speed of impact.

It turns out that the stern was moving through the water

at 50 miles per hour.

Massive forces from chaotically whipping through the ocean at such speed

help explain why the stern is so badly damaged...

while the hydrodynamic bow sliced cleanly through the water

and remained largely intact.

If you have a plane that's damaged in flight,

the air will get under the skin of the plane

and rip pieces off.

NARRATOR: The same thing would likely have happened

with the Titanic's rapidly disintegrating stern.

SAUDER: At first, large chunks came off

and then, once the structure resisted,

small pieces, like confetti, started to fly away.

NARRATOR: Investigators think high-pressure water

may then have found a route into the ship's internal structure,

slamming into its interior walls.

Once the hull is separated from the frames...

water will blast through.

It'll form a ram.

All those interior walls were wooden and they didn't stand a chance.

The water started coming through at full force.

They were pulverized.

NARRATOR: To the team, this is more evidence

for why the stern now looks like a massive car wreck...

while the bow section remains intact.

It's another answer to the mystery.

The investigation has now clarified how the two main sections of the ship

reach the bottom.

It's also shown how they impacted

and why they look so completely different.

But there's still one major question to tackle.

How and when did the Titanic break apart?

NARRATOR: With cutting-edge technology,

we've drained the depths of the Atlantic Ocean...

and exposed the final resting place of the Titanic.

After 100 years of darkness,

her decks once more bask in the warmth of the sun.

Between the bow and stern,

a massive debris field stretches out for hundreds of feet.

For the investigators, it's a view they've never seen before.

Every piece is a potential clue in solving the mystery

of how and why the Titanic broke apart.

For years, the dominant theory has been that she split in two on the surface.

As the sinking bow angled down,

lifting the stern high into the air,

its own unsupported weight became too much.

The ship snapped in half.

But with the ocean now drained away,

new clues are emerging that could challenge that theory.

By looking at the pattern in which the debris fell to the ocean floor,

investigators can retrace the way it fell from the ship.

They'll use this forensic record to get an accurate picture

of how and when the boat tore itself to pieces.

But getting the answer will require a massive effort.

The team must scan all the new underwater data

to ID and tag the position of as many objects as possible...

and build a massive digital map of the artifacts

from the ocean floor.

It includes the positions of the 5,000 or so objects

previous expeditions have recovered from the wreck.

It's a catalog of treasures.

Ornate statues from the ship's grand stairway...

chandeliers that once hung in the first-class smoking room...

the finest crockery from the ship's best restaurant.

There's even one of the Titanic's bronze bells...

and pieces of nautical equipment from the docking bridge.

Every precious object is a critical data point

and could help rewrite the story of how the ship came apart.

The patterns that are emerging from this remapping of the site

don't fit any of the traditional models that were there before.

NARRATOR: The work will take years to complete.

GALLO: There's coffee cups, dinner plates, bits of chandeliers,

deck benches.

It's full of objects from the ship, but also of personal objects as well.

NARRATOR: Each data point on the map is also a story in itself.

A touchstone that reveals a detail of a human life.

[Delgado] These were all real people, who had lives,

who had people who loved them,

families who were impacted by what happened on that night.

NARRATOR: Some artifacts are highly personal.

Delicate jewelry that may once have graced the neck of a society lady.

And perfume bottles with their precious liquid still inside.

It's just a very beautiful, very emotional moment

just to see everything lying there on the ground.

It's a visual story of that tragedy.

NARRATOR: After years of research,

Alex Klingelhofer is now able to tie some of these belongings

to specific named individuals.

This is a pocket watch, an open-face style watch.

This one still has its hands.

It probably stopped when it was immersed in the water.

NARRATOR: The watch came from this spot in a debris field...

1,100 feet southeast of the stern.

KLINGELHOFER:It belonged to Thomas William Solomon Brown.

He was a hotelier from South Africa

and he was headed with his family to make a new start

in the western part of the United States.

He did not survive.

However, his wife and his daughter, Edith, did.

NARRATOR: Other passengers even left behind written traces of their lives

still legible after a century in the water.

A notebook found 780 feet from the stern in the west debris field

belonged to a young third-class passenger,

Edgardo Samuel Andrew.

KLINGELHOFER:He was 17 years old.

When you look at his belongings, you find schoolbooks.

You can still see the writing in here, even though it's quite stained.

He used a pencil and the pencil has remained legible.

Here, on this page,

he's writing his name.

I guess practicing writing his name in the correct way.

You begin to see just this young boy

going third-class by himself to America.

NARRATOR: Edgardo was hoping to make a better life for himself,

like so many immigrants traveling to the new world.

KLINGELHOFER:Unfortunately, Edgardo did not survive the voyage.

That's why this is perhaps such a heartrending object

because it's his last notations.

He's finished with school.

He throws his schoolbooks into this suitcase

and he heads off to America,

and that's the last that we hear of him.

NARRATOR: There are many more objects the team hope to examine further,

some with the potential to flesh out the human face of the tragedy.

Oftentimes history swallows up the ordinary folks.

All of us, we just tend to go away.

Archaeological sites give us an opportunity

to correct that.

NARRATOR: Now the investigation has defined this ghostly place

as an archaeological site,

it will help them protect the Titanic's story

for generations to come.

Each of the priceless artifacts is part of a mosaic of tragic stories,

and together they now form a picture.

The fully mapped debris field is at last ready to give the investigators

the crucial answer they've long been waiting for--

when and where the Titanic broke apart.

NARRATOR: In the two-and-a-half hours it took the Titanic to sink,

over 700 people made it off the ship and into lifeboats.

Hundreds of these survivors witnessed the sinking.

Yet there's always been disagreement about how and when the ship broke apart.

There are still different theories and arguments

as to how things exactly happened when the ship tore in two.

NARRATOR: Now some investigators think the new data

could prove once and for all what really happened.

In recent years, the dominant theory has been that the breakup occurred

while the Titanic was still on the surface.

We know from eyewitnesses

that the stern tilted up out of the water as she sank.

Some experts have argued this created immense stresses,

tearing the ship in two.

But Bill Lange now thinks otherwise.

According to him, the new data paints a different picture.

On the drained ocean floor are all the clues he needs.

To Bill's trained eye,

there's nothing random about the patterns of the debris field.

Like blood spatters at a crime scene, they tell a story.

Now, flooded in daylight for the first time,

with every last corner of the debris field

scanned and analyzed,

he can work out how the Titanic really sank.

It's going to tell us a lot more about what happened to the ship

after it left the surface...

made this two-and-a-half-mile descent to the sea floor

and hopefully tell us more about what happened to Titanic

during its breakup.

NARRATOR: For Bill, there's a key piece of evidence

visible for the first time in the new images

of the exposed ocean floor.

It's the overall scale of the debris field.

The new survey definitively maps the site.

And for the first time, investigators can now see its precise dimensions.

They're not quite the size they expected.

I think the site really isn't that big when you consider the size of the ship.

I mean, you've got an almost 1,000-foot-long ship

that's in two square miles.

NARRATOR: If the ship had fully separated on the surface,

Bill thinks there'd be a much larger scatter area.

LANGE: Considering that it fell a few miles through a water column,

I think that the scattering of artifacts is rather small.

NARRATOR: The lower in the water the separation,

the less distance for debris to spread out as it falls

and the more compact the pattern on the ocean floor.

It's a straightforward argument.

And for Bill, it's evidence the ship separated

much deeper in the water than previously thought.

That's the only way he can explain the small scatter pattern.

One of the most important things, I think, that's come out of this

is that the ship may not have broken up

as fast and as shallow as what was originally thought.

NARRATOR: And when the theory is checked against eyewitness accounts,

there's more evidence.

The survivors' best position to see any breakup

were three men on the aft boat deck.

Their statements recall the funnels falling away from the ship...

but no large-scale disintegration...

and certainly no snapping in two.

Bill and his colleagues around the country

have much more work to do before they arrive at final proof.

But in their view,

there's simply no other way to explain the evidence.

To them, one thing is beyond doubt.

The Titanic did not separate anywhere near the surface.

With powerful new theories, the investigation is beginning to pay off.

The mountain of data from the expedition has allowed us to drain the ocean

and create a new view where we can spot clues

others may have missed.

All the key events of the disaster

left traces on the wreckage or on the seabed.

And they're here for us to see.

Clues that are bringing the final mysteries of the Titanic

into crisp focus.

But while investigators now have a sharper understanding

of the history of the wreck,

there's one key mystery they still hope to unravel.

What will happen to the Titanic in the future?

NARRATOR: This is the exposed Titanic as she looks today,

after a century of decay in the dark depths.

In the 30 years since she was found,

no one's been able to see her quite like this.

As Titanic investigators study the model,

expedition data, and video,

it's becoming ever clearer that month-by-month,

year-by-year...

the ship is disappearing.

And it's happening faster than some experts expected.

P.H. Nargeolet has been going to the wreck for three decades...

and he's seen a big change over time.

The distance between the A deck and the B deck was easily ten feet.

Now it's five, six feet,

and, step-by-step, the deterioration is going close to the bridge.

Soon all the decks will collapse on each other

and everything inside will be lost forever.

NARRATOR: Investigators want to know why it's happening so fast.

At these depths, there's very little oxygen in the water

so metal should rust extremely slowly.

Yet on the expedition footage,

they can clearly see the ship caked in weird formations

that certainly look like some kind of rust.

They call them "rusticles."

LORI JOHNSTON: I was absolutely stunned by the size, the colors.

They're very orange and brown and, yet, when you're close to them,

there are greens and purples and reds and yellows

and every color of the rainbow.

NARRATOR: In the lab, they X-ray pieces of rusticle

recovered from the ship.

What they find inside isn't what might be expected.

This is no ordinary rust.

The structure inside this hard-looking shell

is extremely fragile.

They're filled with millions of ducts and tunnels

and passageways and all of these little cavities,

and all sorts of nutrients are stored in there.

NARRATOR: For the microbiologists on the team,

it's crystal clear.

The rusticles are formed by living organisms.

And when they run further tests,

there's no doubting what these organisms are--

bacteria.

We found five different communities of bacteria

living inside a rusticle,

and then you've got another community living on the outside.

Makes them a very complex little beast.

NARRATOR: They figure out that some of these little beasts

are anaerobic bacteria.

Life-forms that don't need oxygen to survive.

Instead, for their energy supply,

they extract iron and minerals from the ship's metalwork.

Like a swarm of microscopic piranhas,

billions upon billions of them are feeding on the wreck.

The impact of the rusticles on this extremely large ship is overwhelming.

NARRATOR: By studying these tiny creatures,

the microbiologists can now confidently lay down

a time frame for the Titanic's final destruction.

JOHNSTON: If we went back 500 years,

Titanic would look fairly similar to what the bow section looks right now

as far as the hull would be.

It would still be a very U-shape, very formal-looking docked ship.

However, I would expect the deterioration to move from the back to the front

so that a lot of the promenade and deck would have fallen onto itself.

If we were to revisit Titanic in a thousand years,

I would not be able to tell, sort of, the size

of the magnificent ship that she is today.

I would expect that all of the decking would be gone

and the bow would be filled with what would look like

sort of piles of rust.

If you revisited the stern section,

you would see that the deterioration

had greatly increased,

simply because the damage that section had sustained during the sinking.

The bacteria would have taken girders

and basically had encrusted them in rusticles

and deteriorated them to the point

of being a pile of iron ore at the bottom of the sea floor.

NARRATOR: Long before that, the Titanic's custodians

will have to make some tough decisions.

What do we do?

Do we stand by and allow the bow section to collapse upon itself?

Or, in the future, do we actually design some projects

for recovery of certain types of artifacts

from the bow section?

NARRATOR: But any suggestion of bringing up more artifacts

is controversial.

For some descendants of those who lost their lives,

this is a grave site and should be left alone.

Initially, Dave Gallo agreed.

But since the objects have been put on display,

he's less sure.

GALLO: We went to see the Titanic exhibit

and I realized then what a powerful storytelling method it was

to have some of those artifacts with you so you could show someone.

NARGEOLET:For me, the artifacts are the historical memory of the ship.

We can leave everything on the bottom of the ocean forever

and it will be lost.

NARRATOR: However badly the Titanic deteriorates,

one thing's for certain.

Thanks to the new science, much of the ship can never now be lost.

The edge of the site's been defined for the first time,

so its archaeology can be protected.

Every inch of the wreck inside the perimeter

has been scanned and analyzed.

Every known artifact logged, mapped, and captured

in this digital duplicate world that will never erode.

Frozen in time,

we can see and study the wreck like never before.

In broad daylight,

explorers, now and in the future,

can continue their investigation here on the drained ocean floor

where the Titanic rests.

[metal creaking]

Captioned by Pixel Logic Media