New footage taken by a diving excursion company shows, for the first time, the submerged 200-pound anchor chain, giant portside anchor and single-ended boiler of the doomed 1912 ship the Titanic.
On April 14, 1912, the Titanic sank over 12,000 feet to the seafloor after breaking in two pieces from hitting an iceberg. Of the approximately 2,240 passengers aboard the ship, 1,517 perished.
“The amazing detail in the 8k footage will help our team of scientists and maritime archaeologists characterize the decay of the Titanic more precisely as we capture new footage in 2023 and beyond,” Stockton Rush, the president of OceanGate Expeditions enthused. “Capturing this 8K footage will allow us to zoom in and still have 4K quality which is key for large screen and immersive video projects. Even more remarkable are the phenomenal colors in this footage.”
“We are seeing new details in this footage,” Rory Golden, OceanGate Expeditions Titanic expert and diver, celebrated. “For example, I had never seen the name of the anchor maker, Noah Hingley & Sons Ltd., on the portside anchor. I’ve been studying the wreck for decades and have completed multiple dives, and I can’t recall seeing any other image showing this level of detail. It is exciting that, after so many years, we may have discovered a new detail that wasn’t as obvious with previous generations of camera technologies.”
PH Nargeolet, Veteran Nautile submersible pilot, explained what could be seen in the video:
Early in the video you can see the crane used for deploying the enormous 15-ton anchor still located on the deck of the shipwreck and the shackle that was originally attached to the main mast that has now collapsed. Later in the video you see three round structures along the inside of the railing. These are the triple fairleads that were used to feed the docking ropes to the bollards on shore to secure the ship to the dock when the Titanic was at port.
The green lights you see as we view the portside anchor are from the laser scaling system. This system allows us to accurately determine the size of objects we are looking at on camera and through the main viewport of the Titan submersible. The distance between the two green lights is 10 centimeters.
Arguments have persisted for decades as to whether the lack of binoculars available for the sailors’ crow’s nest could have precipitated the clash with the iceberg. David Blair, a merchant seaman, was reassigned from the RMS Titanic just before the voyage. Many believed he inadvertently kept the key to a storage locker where the binoculars were stored.
But the lookouts on duty when the collision occurred, Frederick Fleet and Reginald Lee, protested in the inquiries following the disaster that they were told they would have no binoculars before the trip. When asked whether having binoculars would have enabled him to see the iceberg sooner, Fleet responded, “A bit sooner.” When asked how much sooner, he replied, “Well, enough to get out of the way.”