Cue the Celine Dion torch song: hearts will go on, and thanks to leading edge technology, the Titanic itself will do so as well.
Calling into service a suite of submersible robots, high resolution cameras and acoustic imaging techniques, researchers this week launched their effort to raise the RMS Titanic from where it has been sitting on the floor of the Atlantic Ocean up to the surface for all to see — albeit in a virtual, digitized manner.
Reuters News reports that Expedition Titanic, an ambitious undertaking made possible through research and management conducted at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute in Massachusetts, will offer the most complete and detailed portrait of the doomed vessel, providing a visual record of extensive parts of the ship that have never before been seen. The world’s largest passenger ship upon its 1912 completion, struck an iceberg and sank on its maiden voyage, resting since then at the bottom of the Atlantic 400 miles south of Newfoundland.
As quoted by Reuters, Project Co-leader and Woods Hole Researcher Dave Gallo explains the scope and significance of the project:
“About 40 percent we think — maybe 50 percent — of the Titanic site has never been looked at. Everything to this point has been pretty much exploration, or adventure,” Gallo says, adding that “we want to go into this area and understand where everything is and how it got there. It’s going to be like the CSI of the underwater world.”
It wasn’t until 1985 that a team from Woods Hole confirmed the location of the wreck, and their current efforts to comprehensively document what remains of the wreckage may be arriving just in time. As Reuters indicates, experts have determined that much of the ship’s internal structure has already collapsed and the entire deck may fall to decay and corrosion within 10 years.
The fragility of what remains of Titanic, combined with a widely-held view of the wreckage as a massive underwater grave, has rendered any notion of actually physically raising the ship both difficult and ill-advised. The construction of 3D imaging of the ship and its ocean bottom site, when completed, will be made available online for all to explore and enjoy.
Photo in the public domain via Wikimedia Commons