The RMS Titanic was thought to be unsinkable, but it was not. The ship collided with an iceberg on its maiden voyage to New York City. It plunged to the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean, in two pieces, and 1496 souls perished in the accident. The ship's journey and sad ending have become legendary, with many books, documentaries, and other programs focusing on it. Visits to the wreck don't happen every day, but occasionally they do happen, and not all of them are successful.
Consider the fate of the OceanGate crew. OceanGate's Titan submersible imploded in 2023 while a crew of five was attempting to visit the wreck of the RMS Titanic. Debris from the submersible landed about 1600 feet from the bow of the wreck.
Now, according to USA Today, there is a new mission that will take place in 2024. The dive will be conducted by the RMS Titanic, Inc., a company with exclusive rights to salvage items from the wreck. This time, however, there will be no manned descent or even any salvage. Instead, two remotely operated vehicles will descend to the site and take pictures. The group simply wants to see the current state of the wreck. They call their mission TITANIC Expedition 2024. Who knows what interesting discoveries they might make?
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| RMS Titanic - Source: Meta |
"Titanic’s port side bow rises out of the North Atlantic sea [sic] floor in this incredible and quite dramatic view released in mid 2023 by Atlantic Productions, these new photos and scans having been taken of the ship the previous year. Here, her port anchor, anchor crane, capstans, bow railings and forecastle with remnants of white paint are all clearly visible, as are the steeply sloping mounds of sediments which were plowed up by the impact of the wreck with the ocean bottom. Buried today in this compacted and concrete-like deep sea mud, the ship’s now hidden lower prow took the brunt of the liner’s fall from the surface, breaking both hull and keel beneath her bridge and easily buckling a number of inch thick steel plates further aft.
More than 700,000 images were collected of the wreck site during the summer of 2022 by Magellan Ltd, a deep sea mapping company based out of the United Kingdom. Sewn together into an immensely detailed digital scan, these views of Titanic’s wreck present the most highly accurate and illuminating picture of the lost liner yet seen by historians and researchers since the discovery of the site in 1985, and have continued to provide a wealth of information in the months since their initial public release." (Meta)
