Scan reveals Titanic's final hours in ground-breaking discovery
8 April 2025, 16:05 | Updated: 9 April 2025, 14:26
A detailed new scan of the Titanic has revealed the ship's haunting final hours.
Listen to this article
Loading audio...
An exact 3D replica shows how the ship ripped in two before sinking.
The scan revealed engineers worked until their last moment in the boiler room to keep the ship's lights on, confirming eye-witness accounts.
The images suggest that punctures just the size of an A4 piece of paper in the hull led to the ship sinking.
The ship sank in 1912 after hitting an iceberg in the North Atlantic Ocean - 1,500 passengers lost their lives.
"Titanic is the last surviving eyewitness to the disaster, and she still has stories to tell," said Park Stephenson, a Titanic analyst, told the BBC.
The wreck, lying 3,800m on the ocean floor, was mapped using underwater robots.
More than 700,000 images were taken to create a 3D scan of the wreck.
The bow lies 600m from the stern of the ship - showing how it split in half.
The remains how the damage caused as the vessel slammed into the sea floor after sinking.
The scan was revealed as part of a new documentary by National Geographic and Atlantic Productions.
The wreck lies so deep that submersibles have struggled to explore the remains.
"It's like a crime scene: you need to see what the evidence is, in the context of where it is," Mr Stephenson told the broadcaster.
"And having a comprehensive view of the entirety of the wreck site is key to understanding what happened here."
The scan reveals portholes that could have been smashed by the iceberg - corroborating eye-witness accounts of ice splintering into people's cabins.
Passengers also said that the ship's lights were still on as it plunged into the waves.
The scan has proved this true, as the huge boiler rooms appear concave. This suggests the engineers were still operating as the ship sank.
Joseph Bell led the team of engineers, staying behind to shovel coal into the furnaces.
"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," Mr Stephenson said.
"They held the chaos at bay as long as possible, and all of that was kind of symbolised by this open steam valve just sitting there on the stern."
The visual simulation provides detailed insights into the ship's sinking.
It reveals its speed, direction and position, predicting the damage of the iceberg crash.
"We used advanced numerical algorithms, computational modelling and supercomputing capabilities to reconstruct the Titanic sinking," said Jeom-Kee Paik, research lead at University College London.
The ship only skimmed against the iceberg, leaving the Titanic with punctures along a narrow section of the hull.
The damage was across six compartments.
"The difference between Titanic sinking and not sinking are down to the fine margins of holes about the size of a piece of paper," Simon Benson, an associate lecturer in naval architecture at the University of Newcastle, told the BBC.
"But the problem is that those small holes are across a long length of the ship, so the flood water comes in slowly but surely into all of those holes, and then eventually the compartments are flooded over the top and the Titanic sinks."
Titanic: The Digital Resurrection premieres 15th April at 8pm on the National Geographic Channel.
Some of the damage cannot eb seen as it's on the lower section, hidden as it lies on the sea floor.
Images reveals passenger possessions are strewn across the sea floor.
It will take years for all the details to come to the surface of what happened that night in 1912.
