Tragic new details about Titanic workers' final hours revealed
Topics: Titanic, World News, TV And Film, Disney Plus, Documentaries
Rhiannon Ingle
Featured Image Credit: Getty Stock Images
Topics: Titanic, World News, TV And Film, Disney Plus, Documentaries
A new documentary has given us never-before-known details about RMS Titanic's final moments before she sunk into the North Atlantic Ocean.
Over a century ago now, as many as 2,240 people set sail on the 'unsinkable' RMS Titanic as she left Southampton, England on 10 April, 1912, on her maiden voyage to New York City.
However, only 705 people would make it off alive after the 'unsinkable' vessel hit an iceberg and sunk just a few days later on 14 April, which is 113 years ago as of yesterday.
The US committee investigating the sinking estimated that a staggering 1,517 lives were lost, while its British counterpart determined that 1,503 died.
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It was the crew who suffered the most casualties, however, with around 700 deaths. Third class took a massive hit too, with only 174 of its approximately 710 passengers surviving.
Now, more details are coming to light about the doomed ship's fate and the final moments of those on board thanks to new tech that was sent down to the deteriorating wreck, resulting in the most detailed scan of the ship to date.
The first-ever full-sized 3D scan of the ship’s wreckage is now being studied in a new National Geographic documentary.
The doc in question, which is now on Disney+, is titled Titanic: The Digital Resurrection and it sees analysts view the ship’s 'digital twin' to discover new insights into what actually went down that fateful night and, specifically, what the crew were doing in their final moments.
The 3D scan, which has been composed using 700,000 images of the wreckage taken from every angle, revealed that some of the boilers were concave at the time the vessel plunged into the water.
This suggests that the boilers, which produced steam to power many of the ship’s basic functions, were still up and running when the colossal ship sank.
Alongside the concave boilers, a valve located the deck of the stern was found to be in the open position, which indicates that steam was still powering the ship’s electrical system.
These two findings paired with a number of eyewitness accounts from survivors supports the belief that ship engineers were tirelessly shovelling coal into the ship's furnaces in order to keep the lights on for as long as possible as passengers escaped.
"They kept the lights and the power working to the end, to give the crew time to launch the lifeboats safely with some light instead of in absolute darkness," Parks Stephenson, a Titanic analyst, told the BBC.
He also noted that all of these heroic engineers devastatingly lost their lives in the tragedy.
Even with the extremely high death toll, there aren't actually any human remains at the Titanic wreck, and the reason is pretty interesting.
"The issue you have to deal with is, at depths below about 3,000 feet (around 914 metres), you pass below what's called the calcium carbonate compensation depth," founder of the wreckage Ballard explained to NPR back in 2009.
The former Naval Reserve commanding officer continued: "And the water in the deep sea is under saturated in calcium carbonate, which is mostly, you know, what bones are made of.
"For example, on the Titanic and on the Bismarck, those ships are below the calcium carbonate compensation depth, so once the critters eat their flesh and expose the bones, the bones dissolve."
Titanic: The Digital Resurrection is currently streaming on Disney+ and Hulu.