A new digital recreation of the Titanic might offer clues about how it sank — take a closer look

The ship's size, its famous passengers, the unfathomable loss of life, and the harrowing tales from survivors instantly made it headline news.

Interest in the disaster continued, especially in 1985 when Robert Ballard and Jean-Louis Michel found the shipwreck during a secret US Navy mission.

It's far too fragile to raise. Artifacts and small pieces of the ship have been recovered, but the rusting remains will stay on the ocean floor.

It's risky and expensive to visit the shipwreck — five people died when a submersible visiting the Titanic imploded in June 2023 — and conditions are murky at that depth. The digital twin offers an ultra-clear view that's impossible to see from a submersible.

Two submersibles, Romeo and Juliet, spent three weeks photographing and measuring the ship and the debris surrounding the two halves. The digital model is made up of the images and scans to reveal areas of the ship that are hard to view from trips to the wreck.

Other techniques have been used to create photo mosaics of the Titanic, but this photogrammetry process captured every inch of the wreck — down to its rivets — and its surroundings without losing resolution or details.

"You can zoom right into an area of interest, right down to a floor tile on the ocean floor," Stephenson told BI. "It is amazing."

Stephenson, who appears in the documentary, has viewed the Titanic a few times from crewed and uncrewed submersibles. He said that in person, it's difficult to see much of the ship through a 7-inch viewport. That meant he was glimpsing the ship section by section instead of as a whole. "What you really need to make sense of all this evidence is context," he said.

"It's how it's all put together and presented as a whole that's the paradigm shift here," Stephenson said. "That's what's going to be the future of deep ocean exploration."

Crew member Frederick Fleet described hitting the iceberg as a narrow shave, thinking they'd avoided disaster. Many passengers didn't realize the ship had struck anything. Yet the collision was deadly.

The Titanic's builders designed the ship to withstand four of its 16 compartments flooding. Edward Wilding, a naval architect who worked on the design, speculated from the beginning that the iceberg scraping alongside the ship punctured more than four sections. Enough water flowed in to pull down the entire ship.

The portion of the ship that struck the iceberg slammed into the seafloor when it sank. It's now buried in mud. Even if it were visible, it would likely be difficult to tell the difference between the damage before and after sinking.

For the documentary, researchers from University College London and Newcastle University put together a simulation to find some potential answers. Using the ship's blueprints and estimated speed, they found that the iceberg may have torn open an 18-square-foot gash along six compartments, enough to take down the Titanic.

The simulation aligned very closely with Wilding's speculations from over 100 years ago.

"He really knew that ship," Anthony Geffen, the film's producer, told BI, which is perhaps why they match so well.

With much of the bow sunk in the mud, we may never know the full story of the iceberg's effect, Stephenson said.

In Cameron's movie, the ship basically cracks in half. Passenger Jack Thayer later wrote that part of the ship rose into the sky and seemed to hang there, and then, "with the deadened noise of the bursting of her last few gallant bulkheads, she slid quietly away from us into the sea."

"Even Jim Cameron, today, will say that the way he depicted it in the movie is not correct," Stephenson said. It was based on what was known in 1997, which was eyewitness testimony, like Thayer's.

The way it broke apart may have been far more explosive. The model shows large pieces of the hull scattered around the wreck that may be evidence of such an event.

"It was a giant, catastrophic fracture," metallurgist Jennifer Hooper said in the documentary, which caused a domino effect of compression and buckling that destroyed roughly 20% of the ship.

That might explain why the two large sections of the ship are a third of a mile apart, Geffen said. "Something massive must have happened," he said. "It didn't just float apart."

Before the ocean liner disappeared under the water, survivors recalled its lights still being on. The model gives a clear view of boiler room two. That's likely where the Titanic engineers stayed until the end, shoveling coal to keep the ship illuminated and the wireless transmitting calls for help.

Further away, a valve can be seen in the open position, indicating that steam continued flowing to generate electricity.

"These boilers tell us about a very personal story about the people" who stayed behind on the ship, Geffen said.

First-class passengers John Jacob Astor and Benjamin Guggenheim, two of the wealthiest men on the boat, both lost their lives — the documentary revealed that the crumbling ship may have come apart right where the first-class cabins were located.

The crew's and passengers' possessions are scattered for miles around the Titanic. Researchers have been able to identify the owners' of some of them from these new images, and Geffen said AI could help find more.

For example, there's a shark tooth that seems to have been attached to a pocket watch belonging to a first-class passenger, Colonel John Weir.

The Titanic site is a graveyard, where hundreds of people lost their lives. "I think sometimes that gets lost," Geffen said, but their belongings can help tell their stories.

The new scans have frozen the Titanic in time. It's already covered in rusticles, the pointy structures created by deep-sea bacteria. As it continues to deteriorate, more evidence will be lost.

As well as being dangerous and expensive, some also consider visiting the site via submersible disrespectful. Geffen said there are plans to put the digital twin in simulators so people can do virtual dives to the wreck, instead. Eventually, people will be able to put on a VR headset and walk around the site.

"With this digital twin, we can now bring the entire Titanic wreck site up to the surface and make it available to everyone," Stephenson said.

"Titanic: The Digital Resurrection" premieres on National Geographic on April 11 and on Disney+ and Hulu on April 12.