TECHNOLOGY
Titanic: Seen as never before
May 17, 2023 - The first full-sized digital scan of the Titanic – which lies 3,800m beneath the Atlantic – has been created by Magellan, a deep-sea mapping company, using 700,000 side-scan sonar images.
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Magellan and Atlantic Productions carried out the scan in the summer of 2022.
Side-scan sonars emit conical or fan-shaped pulses across a wide angle perpendicular to the path of their towed sensors, so-called “towfish.” The received signals create a “sonograph,” a detailed image of the reflectivity of the sea floor and any object within the swath of the beam.
Towfish, remotely controlled by a team on board Magellan’s tow ship, spent more than 200 hours surveying the length and breadth of the Titanic.
“The depth of it, almost 4,000m, represents a challenge, and you have currents at the site, too -- and we’re not allowed to touch anything so as not to damage the wreck,” explained Magellan’s Gerhard Seiffert, who led the planning for the expedition.
“And the other challenge is that you have to map every square centimetre -- even uninteresting parts, like on the debris field you have to map mud, but you need this to fill in between all these interesting objects.”
The bow, now covered in stalactites of rust, is still instantly recognisable even 100 years after the ship struck an iceberg on its maiden voyage from Southampton to New York in 1912. More than 1,500 people died in the disaster. The hope is that the scan could reveal more about what happened on the night the Titanic was lost.