Investigating the Titanic (Full Episode) | Drain the Oceans

for a century the Titanic has been hidden in darkness two and a half miles down at the bottom of the Atlantic 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 iceberg that sliced her open a team of scientists equipped with Cutting Edge tools now tackles the long-standing mysteries of the disaster that could rewrite the Titanic's story drain Drive of the Titanic as you've never used before [Music] it's the most infamous ship in all history the Titanic from a time when ocean liners are racing to be the biggest fastest and best the RMS Titanic the technological mark when she sets sail in 1912 it's the largest moving man-made object on the planet an unsinkable ship but around two and a half thousand miles into her maiden voyage disaster 500 passengers and crew dragged down to the icy depths and more than a century later we still don't know exactly what happened that night how's she saying and broke apart hundreds of passengers and crew witnessed the tragedy and lived to tell the tale yet countless unanswered questions remain we have lots of historical information but often there are biases in 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 those questions is to use science explorers first discovered the Titanic's wreckage in September 1985. [Music] all right 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 an Explorer's headlights at any one time [Music] nobody's ever been able to see the whole wreck or even find the edges of the site trying to understand Titanic with the existing technology was like trying to draw a map of downtown Manhattan from the height of a 10-story building in a vehicle that has the windows fogged up pitch black and you're trying to look at it through a flashlight challenging to say the least 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 sang 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 sits on the ocean floor their data will allow us to virtually peel back the sea strip away trillions of gallons of the Atlantic Ocean two and a half miles down feel the unsinkable Titanic drain dry 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 investigators programmed the auvs to fly as close as 30 feet above the red the underwater drones then fire signals measuring variations in height down to the tiniest detail they crisscross the rank 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 every single day these vehicles would come back with some new bit of information about what was on the bottom tidal wave of new data comes to the surface within 160 hours of video in total 37 terabytes of data but to see what they've got takes time over the next week Banks of computers crunched the raw data turning millions of sonar points into a complex model of the wreck I remember all of us sort of sitting around the computer when we first were building the 3D 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 was pretty amazing at the same time visualization expert Bill Lang 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 it's a very long and tedious process there were over 200 other mosaics that were done for site interpretation and and future archaeological work this ultra high def imagery together with the 3D 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 and now we can strip bear an extraordinary landscape pull the plug from the Atlantic [Music] and a half miles down giant walls of steel Tower into the sky sunlight hits her decks once more countless Clues to the disaster start to emerge is the drain drag of the Titanic we've drained the Titanic and for the first time and see the ship in its entirety an unprecedented detail now investigators can map out the site's boundaries and archaeologists get an overview of a wreck that's been hidden for more than 100 years it's almost like the fog has been cleared away and can now start to see through the Perpetual Darkness the idea of draining of the Titanic presents the site in a whole different life it's not impenetrable it's right there in front of us to explore the Titanic's wreckage has spread out over half a square mile of the exposed ocean floor an area of some 200 soccer 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 in all there are five debris fields each scattered with fragments of the ship and objects that tumbled out as she sang Vistas Unleashed by the new model bring the Titanic back to life with the water Stripped Away story is laid out in plain sight people think science is above emotion you know when you're looking at the boat deck where you know so many people say goodbye to one another these are important points on that ship 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 were 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 crowsness where Lookout Frederick fleet's voice shattered The Silence of the night as he first spotted the looming iceberg the Titanic's iconic eight and a half 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 spouse section Towers above the seabed despite the violence of the sinking and all that time on the bottom what's inside that bowel in particular is still a ghostly sense of the ship that was inside the bow were many of the most luxurious of the ship's features the grand staircase running the height of five decks [Music] heated swimming pool reserved for first-class passengers only [Music] 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 [Music] embedded in the exposed ocean floor almost perfectly upright ghostly shell of the Titanic seems to be sailing across the seabed her prowl parting the mud almost like water [Music] 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 which had 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 one separated from the rest of the ship the bowel 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 31 000 ton truck slamming into a snow drift with the bow finally reached the bottom it plowed in to the dirt almost all the way up to the anchors 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 the fact that the bow is intact 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 more than a third of her entire Hull however eyewitness records proved 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 phn archelay 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 Heisenberg why it was like that why we saw we saw some crack why is there is a crack here and not here Marshall Lee 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 the profile mosaics show Titanic in a way that that people hadn't seen it before no one had done a profile view of Titanic's bow in the 25 years that people have been going to Titanic here again even with these pen Sharp Images they find no sign of anything approaching a 300 foot tear on the hull however when they turned to the video footage investigators can see much smaller areas of impact damage foreign damage appears to be confined to a maybe a 30-foot length of the bow wasn't like a gash and it wasn't tens of small gases the size of these gaps in the hull adds up to just 11 square feet I breached 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 turns out to be two and a half hours exactly the time the ship actually took to safe an enduring mystery is solved litigations further confirmed that the giant gash is fiction and that the iceberg made only small punctures below the water line together were enough to trigger disaster for the team there's an even bigger question looming that our new model could shed light on ship get torn in half how did her valve become separated from her Stern by a staggering two thousand feet the answer is here in broad daylight drain seafloor in the exposed record of the Titanic 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 two thousand feet beyond the massive bow section in the heart of the debris Fields lays the dismembered Stern the back end of the ship it's the second largest fragment 392 feet long it's immediately obvious that it's in very different condition than the bowel the stern is a mess it looks like it's been ripped up like confetti [Music] the stir today is pure chaos some of the Stern's huge metal components are still intact like the 40-foot High engines each the size of a large house [Music] detailed model also shows decks collapse crushed together heavy steel beams twisted and torn like straws it's hard to figure out what you're looking at to me it almost looks like a giant pieces of metal sitting on the sea floor but tough to make it out as a piece of a ship why is it in such bad condition investigators have struggled to fully explain this the stern section has its problems and interpretation because it's so completely broken up 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 it's a massive Mark carved into the seabed and the stern made impact scientists can now read the tracks and interpret how the stern impacted the seafloor you can see very well when the stern hits the bottom the stone was still turning and you can see the bottom of the ship on port side showing that the stone was turning in same time the marks allow investigators to work out the speed of impact earn was moving through the water at 50 miles per hour massive forces from the ship 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 claim it's damaged in Flight the air will get under the skin of the plane and rip pieces off the same thing would likely have happened with the Titanic's rapidly disintegrating Stern at first large chunks came off and then once the structure resisted small pieces like confetti started to fly away investigators think high pressure water they 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 a little form of 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 to the team this is more evidence of 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 impact why they look so completely different major question to tackle how and when did the Titanic break apart [Music] with Cutting Edge technology we've drained the depths of the Atlantic Ocean and expose 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 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 in High its own unsupported weight became too much the ship snapped in half but with the ocean now drained away 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 getting the answer or 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 [Music] and build a massive digital map of the artifacts from the ocean floor it includes the positions of the 5000 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 finest Crockery from the ship's best restaurant there's even one of the Titanic's bronze Bells [Music] this is of nautical equipment from the docking Bridge every precious object is a critical data point 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 the work will take years to complete [Music] coffee cups dinner plates bits of chandeliers deck benches that's full of objects from the ship but also personal objects as well each data point on the map is also a story in itself a touchstone that reveals the detail of a human life these were all real people who had Lives who had people who loved them families who were impacted by what happened on that night some artifacts are highly personal delicate jewelry that may have once 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 after years of research Alex klingel author is now able to tie some of these belongings to specific named individuals this is a pocket watch an open face styled watch this one still has its hands it probably stopped when it was immersed in the water the watch came from this spot in a debris field Eleven Hundred feet southeast of the stern it belonged to Thomas Williams 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 [Music] other passengers 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 foreign he was 17 years old when you look at his belongings you find school books 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 so in Third Class by Himself to America Edgardo was hoping to make a better life for himself like so many immigrants traveling to the new world unfortunately Edgar did not survive the voyage that's why this is perhaps such a heart-rending object because it's his last notations he's finished with school he throws his school books into this suitcase and he heads off to America and that's the last that we hear of him there are many more objects the team hopes 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 now that the investigation has defined this ghostly place as an archaeological site it will help them protect the Titanic story for generations to come each of the Priceless artifacts is part of a mosaic of tragic stories together form a picture the fully mapped debris field is at last ready to give investigators The crucial answer they've long been waiting for when and where the Titanic broke apart in the two and a half hours it took the Titanic to sink more than 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 into 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 the stern tilted up out of the water as she sang some experts have argued this created immense stresses tearing the ship into but Bill Lang 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 build'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 sang to tell us a lot more about what happened to the ship after it left the surface foreign 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 for Bill the new images of the exposed ocean floor make a key piece of evidence visible for the first time the overall scale of the debris field the new survey definitively Maps the site and for the first time investigators can see its precise dimensions not quite the size they expected I think the the site really isn't that big when you consider the size of the ship I mean we've got a almost thousand foot long ship that's in two square miles the ship had fully separated on the surface Bill thinks there'd be a much larger scatter area considering that it fell a few miles through water column I think that the scattering of of artifacts is rather small the lower and 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 the only way he can explain the small scatter pattern one of the most important things I think that's come out of us is that the ship may not have broken up as fast and as shallow as as what was originally thought and when the theory is checked against eyewitness accounts there's more evidence the survivors with the 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 into 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 Titanic did not separate anywhere near the surface powerful new theories the investigation is beginning to pay off the mountain of data from the Expedition has allowed us to drain the ocean create a new view where we can spot Clues others may have missed all the key events of the disaster traces on the wreckage or on the seabed they're here for us to see clues that are bringing the final Mysteries of the Titanic to crisp Focus while investigators now have a sharper understanding of the history of the wreck one key mystery they still hope to unravel what will happen to the Titanic in the future this is the exposed Titanic as she looks today after A Century Of Decay in the dark depths [Music] 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 clearer month by month year by year the ship is disappearing and it's happening faster than some experts expected has been going to the wreck for three decades he's seen a big change over time the distance between the a deck and the B deck was easily 10 feet now is five six feet and step by step the deterioration is going close to the bridge for the texture will collapse on each other and everything inside will be lost forever 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 I was absolutely stunned by the size the colors they're very orange and brown and yet when you're close to them they're greens and purples and reds and yellows and every color of the rainbow 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 ducks and tunnels and passageways and all of these little cavities and all sorts of nutrients are stored in there 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 of Rascal and then you've got another community living on the outside makes them a very complex little beast 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 metal work a swarm of microscopic piranhas billions upon billions of them are feeding on the wreck [Music] the impact of the rusticles on this extremely large ship is overwhelming by studying these tiny creatures the microbiologists can now confidently lay down a time frame for the Titanic's final destruction if we went back in 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 at 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 student section you would see that the deterioration had greatly increased simply because of the damage that section had sustained during the sinking the bacteria would have taken girders and basically had encrusted them in rusticles and deteriorating to the point of being a pile of iron ore at the bottom of the seafloor long before that happens the Titanic's custodians will have to make tough decisions what do we do is 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 of from the bow section but any suggestion of bringing up more artifacts is controversial for some descendants of those who lost their lives the this is a grave site and should be left alone initially David Gallo agreed but since the objects have been put on display he's less sure 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 just you could show someone for me charity facts are the historical memory of the show leave everything on the bottom of the ocean forever and it will be lost however badly the Titanic deteriorates one thing certainly thanks to the new science much of the ship can now never be lost the edge of the site's been defined for the first time so its archeology can be protected every inch of the wreck inside the perimeter has been scanned and analyzed every known artifact law mapped and captured in this in this look at 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 the Thai tent rests [Music]

Channel: National Geographic

Views: 7,784,671

Keywords: national geographic, nat geo, natgeo, animals, wildlife, science, explore, discover, survival, nature, culture, documentary, perpetual planet nat geo, photography, full episode, Drain the Titanic, Drain the Oceans, shipwreck, the Titanic, icy waters, Atlantic Ocean, tragic loss, wreck site, Virtually draining the Titanic, Explore with us, documentary 2023, survival skills, tv shows, photography 101

Id: bXlalGvxkaY

Length: 44min 24sec (2664 seconds)

Published: Sat Jan 28 2023