In the upcoming April issue of National Geographic Magazine the wreck of the Titanic will be shown in a stunning new view. For the first time ever, the legendary wreck will be presented in whole compiled from thousands of high-resolution pictures. The pictures paint an interesting picture of a ship that was put through a monumental amount of stress as it twisted to the bottom of the sea. Some of them show an unrecognizable mass of metal, while others show a clear picture of the ship in whole.
The wreck is spread out over a thousand acres of the sea floor, again demonstrating the kinetic force exerted on the ship as it broke in half, then into pieces as it sunk after hitting that ill-placed iceberg. Included in the April issue is another one of my favorite bits of National Geographic Magazine – a poster. This one showing the Titanic‘s final moments. If you’ve read National Geographic as long as I have, you know that many of the posters are what we would now call “infographics” before infographics were “cool.”
The April 2012 edition of National Geographic goes into the specifics of the exploration and photography, but this excerpt covers the main points of the project:
In a tricked-out trailer on a back lot of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI), William Lange stands over a blown-up sonar survey map of the Titanic site — a meticulously stitched-together mosaic that has taken months to construct. At first look the ghostly image resembles the surface of the moon, with innumerable striations in the seabed, as well as craters caused by boulders dropped over millennia from melting icebergs.
On closer inspection, though, the site appears to be littered with man-made detritus — a Jackson Pollock-like scattering of lines and spheres, scraps and shards. Lange turns to his computer and points to a portion of the map that has been brought to life by layering optical data onto the sonar image. He zooms in, and in, and in again. Now we can see the Titanic’s bow in gritty clarity, a gaping black hole where its forward funnel once sprouted, an ejected hatch cover resting in the mud a few hundred feet to the north. The image is rich in detail: In one frame we can even make out a white crab clawing at a railing.
Here, in the sweep of a computer mouse, is the entire wreck of the Titanic — every bollard, every davit, every boiler. What was once a largely indecipherable mess has become a high-resolution crash scene photograph, with clear patterns emerging from the murk. “Now we know where everything is,” Lange says. “After a hundred years, the lights are finally on.”