Featured Image Credit: RMS Titanic Inc
Topics: Titanic, History, Science, Technology
Joe Yates
At a first glance, it looks like something out of a video game... But recent footage captured from the bottom of the North Atlantic ocean of the sunken Titanic is harrowingly real.
The Titanic's shipwreck lies around 12,500 feet below sea level and is a constant reminder of the 1,517 lives that were lost when the vessel struck an iceberg way back on April 15, 1912.
For 73 years, the entire planet was dumbfounded at how something so big and 'unsinkable' - with it being 175 feet tall and 883 feet long - could just disappear.
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Countless expeditions were launched by people all around the world exploring the seabed, until Robert Ballard, of Wichita, Kansas, came across it in 1985 - thanks to his pioneering use of deep-diving submersibles.
Since then the rusty, decaying wreck has been explored thousands of times by scientists, explorers and tourists - including OceanGate, the company that owned the ill-fated submersible that imploded on its way to the wreckage in June 2023, taking the lives of all five men onboard.
Now, thanks to Titanic Expedition 2024, a shocking revelation has been made regarding the ship's wreckage thanks to new technology.
The mission involved scanning and documenting the RMS Titanic and it's debris field - the resting place of a 2-foot-tall bronze statuette of the Roman goddess Diana - which took hundreds of hours to do so.
It has been 112 years since tragedy struck so of course, there has been some vast changes to the ship's appearance in that time - with the intense pressure from the ocean floor, as well as rust from the water itself.
It is fair to say it is a completely different beast to what departed from Southampton, England, all those years ago.
Incredibly, the bow of the Titanic has drastically changed in the short period of time since it was last pictured - the bow being where Jack held Rose at the front of the ship in the 1997 blockbuster film.
When the research team finally visited the ship earlier in the summer, on July 29, they discovered that the railing around the bow was no longer one piece - with a large section, around 15 feet wide had fallen overboard.
The shocking revelation has now changed the face of the front of the ship entirely, but it won't be the last change as the vessel continues to battle such intense pressure.
Writing about the discovery, the team behind the expedition at RMS Titanic Inc, said: "The Expedition team and partners at 3D at Depth immediately reviewed the multibeam imagery from two days prior to confirm that the section of railing had fallen as one piece and was lying on the seafloor directly below.
"We are saddened by this loss and the inevitable decay of the Ship and the debris.
"Over the course of the next few weeks and months, we will conduct a more thorough review of Titanic’s condition and her changes over time.
"Although Titanic’s collapse is inevitable, this evidence strengthens our mission to preserve and document what we can before it is too late."