Illustrative photo – Parts of the Titanic wreck could soon collapse. The progressive decomposition of the sunken vessel shows the first pictures of the wreck after 14 years.
Washington – The American Oceanographic Institute has released a rare video of the sunken Titanic at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean. The footage, not yet available to the public, was taken in 1986, shortly after the wreck was found. They were published on the occasion of the twenty-fifth anniversary of the premiere of the movie Titanic. The BBC news website reports about it today.
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The sinking of the British liner Titanic on its maiden voyage is the most famous shipping disaster. The Belfast-built vessel sank after colliding with an iceberg in the North Atlantic in April 1912. Over 1,500 people lost their lives.
The Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) in the US state of Massachusetts has now released unique images of the wreck, most of which have not been seen by the public. They were taken during a survey by a three-man team in July 1986 in the Alvin submarine.
The wreck of the ship, which was declared unsinkable before its fateful voyage, was discovered in September 1985 by WHOI oceanographer Robert Ballard together with a French team. It was located at a depth of about four kilometers approximately 595 kilometers off the coast of the eastern Canadian province of New Foundland.
Ballard noted that four kilometers below the surface he saw “a huge steel wall studded with rivets, towering 100 meters above us”. “Nothing was small … it was scary,” he stated. There were no more human bones at the site, but Ballard could see shoes, including shoes that appeared to belong to the mother and child. “After the sinking of the Titanic, those in the water without life jackets died of hypothermia,” the oceanographer said.
According to Ballard, the survey was originally a front for a search ordered by then-US President Ronald Reagan to find two lost submarines from the Cold War. wars between which the Titanic was located.
In July 1986, the WHOI team returned to the Titanic, and it was from this expedition that more than an hour of footage has now been released. Ballard was also a member of the expedition team at the time.
A second remote-controlled vessel, Jason Jr, also took part in the event and took some of the published footage. It was able to get inside the wreck while the team in the Alvin submersible examined the outside of the ship. The Jason Jr footage includes the crew cabins.
According to a video shared by WHOI on their YouTube channel, a total of 11 dives were made on the Titanic in 1986.
The release of the footage was coordinated with the re-introduction of the blockbuster Titanic to cinemas on the occasion of the 25th anniversary of its release. Directed by James Cameron and starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet, the film won 11 Oscars, including Best Picture. “The human stories embodied in this great ship still resonate,” Cameron said in a statement, thanking WHOI for helping “tell an important part of the story” of Titanic.
