The first time we laid eyes on the wreckage of the Titanic was in 1986, thanks to a remotely operated submersible craft equipped with a camera. The images of this first exploration of the ship have just been published in full.
While the movie Titanic is back in cinemas to celebrate its 25th anniversary, now never-before-seen images of the infamous ocean liner are resurfacing. A 1:21 a.m. video was posted while you were sleeping, on the night of Wednesday February 15 to Thursday February 16, by the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute (WHOI) on its page Youtube. These are the very first videos ever recorded of the ship at the bottom of the water which have mostly never been shown to the public as is, reports ScienceAlert.
The video was made in July 1986, almost 75 years after the sinking of the gigantic boat in 1912, sunk by an iceberg in the North Atlantic Ocean. Without comment, we dive into a breathtaking atmosphere, that of the discovery of a famous wreck linked to a historical accident and which still raises as much mystery. The grain of the video is that of the technology of the time: that of the U.S. Navy’s remote-controlled submersible Alvin, as well as that of the smaller Jason Junior craft, attached to Alvin by a cable and used to get to the recesses of the hull of the boat.
Passenger shoes found
The man who was on board Alvin, Robert Ballard, reflected on this surreal moment in an interview: “The first thing I saw coming out of the darkness was this wall, this giant wall of steel that rose more than 30 and a few meters above us”, reports l’Associated Press. He said he saw no skeletons or bones that may have belonged to the victims during his exploration, but still saw shoes that seemed to have belonged to a mother and her baby. “It was as if they were looking at us, it was very disturbing”, he recalls.
The ship was first discovered in September 1985 during a joint mission between Ifremer (French research institute for the exploitation of the sea) and OMSI (Oregon museum of science and industry). An underwater camera had been sent for scouting, but it was not until July 1986 that a three-person WHOI-operated crew returned to capture these impressive images. Since then, a documentary by James Cameron released in 2003, Titanic’s Ghostsshed more light on the story of this wreck, which fascinated the world after the release in 1997 of the film by the same director, carried by Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet.
The Titanic lies 3,780 meters underwater in the North Atlantic Ocean, approximately 685 kilometers south of the Canadian island of Newfoundland and Labrador and Saint Pierre and Miquelon. The huge ocean liner sailed from Southampton, England, bound for New York, before sinking on April 15, 1912.
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