Drain the Titanic

For a century, the Titanic has been hidden in darkness...

two-and-a-half miles down, at the bottom of the Atlantic.

But now a new investigation is about to drain the ocean...

pull the plug of the Atlantic and reveal the wreck.

The Titanic as she's never been seen before.

And in the bright light of day,

we uncover critical new pieces of evidence not previously visible...

from giant gouges on the ocean floor

to damage from the iceberg that sliced her open.

A team of scientists equipped with cutting-edge tools

now tackle the long-standing mysteries of the disaster

that could rewrite the Titanic's story.

Drained dry...

this is the wreck of the Titanic as you've never seen it before.

It's the most infamous ship in all history,

the Titanic.

From a time when ocean liners are racing to be

the biggest, the fastest, and the best...

the RMS Titanic is a technological marvel.

When she sets sail in 1912,

she's the largest moving man-made object on the planet.

An unsinkable ship.

But around 2,500 miles into her maiden voyage,

disaster.

1,500 passengers and crew dragged down to the icy depths.

And over a century later, we still don't know

exactly what happened that night.

How she sank and broke apart.

Hundreds of passengers and crew witnessed the tragedy

and lived to tell the tale.

Yet, despite this, there remain countless unanswered questions.

We have lots of historical information,

but often there are biases in those historical accounts.

Even the eyewitnesses of the sinking of Titanic

had many different perceptions of how that sinking took place.

So the best way to unravel some of those questions

is to use science.

Explorers first discovered the Titanic's wreckage in September 1985.

The boiler! Yeah!

Since then, more than 20 expeditions have gone back to the ship.

Two-and-a-half miles down,

this is a place as alien as the surface of the moon.

Only a few yards of the Titanic's hull are visible

in the explorer's headlights at any one time.

Nobody's ever been able to see the whole wreck

or even find the edges of the site.

In the past, trying to understand Titanic with the existing technology

was like trying to draw a map of downtown Manhattan

from the height of a ten-story building

in a vehicle that has the windows fogged up.

It's pitch black and you're trying to look at it through a flashlight.

Challenging, to say the least.

Critical clues to understanding the disaster

still lurk in this darkness.

Now, a team of scientists funded by the legal steward of the wreck,

RMS Titanic, Inc.,

are set to change all that

and bring the Titanic into the clear light of day for the first time.

An epic high-tech investigation

to discover exactly how and why she sank...

the Titanic Mapping Project.

The mission, use cutting-edge sonar mapping technology

to scan every part of the wreck.

And build a precise digital model of the Titanic...

as she sits on the ocean floor.

Their data will allow us to virtually peel back the sea.

Strip away trillions of gallons of the Atlantic Ocean

and two-and-a-half miles down

reveal the unsinkable Titanic...

drained dry on the ocean floor.

But scanning the deep ocean isn't easy.

Autonomous underwater vehicles, AUVs,

have to dive down through 12,000 feet of water.

It's incredibly challenging to work at Titanic.

It's dangerous. It's a very dangerous place.

Investigators program the AUVs

to fly as close as 30 feet above the wreck.

The underwater drones then fire signals,

measuring variations in height down to the tiniest detail.

They crisscross the wreck and seabed

like mowing a gigantic lawn.

Each pass scans a 150-foot wide strip,

gathering millions of data points.

Next, the team deploys an ROV,

a remote-controlled sub attached by cable,

to capture thousands of digital images of every point on the wreck.

Every single day these vehicles would come back

with some new bit of information about what was on the bottom.

A tidal wave of new data comes to the surface.

Over 160 hours of video.

In total, 37 terabytes of data.

But to see what they've got takes time.

Over the next weeks, banks of computers crunch the raw data,

turning millions of sonar points into a complex model of the wreck.

I remember all of us sort of sitting around the computer

when we first were building the 3-D layer

and seeing the bow and seeing the stern in so much detail.

We were all sort of grinning at the screen.

Looking at all that data and seeing that for the first time

was pretty amazing.

At the same time,

visualization expert Bill Lange begins stitching together

thousands of individual images of the wreck...

a task that takes him and his team at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution

six months to complete.

It was a very long and tedious process.

There were over 200 other mosaics that were done

for site interpretation and feature archaeological work.

This ultra high-def imagery,

together with the 3-D scan...

can now unlock a new vision of the Titanic,

a wreck that's been shrouded in darkness

for over a century.

It's been four years in the making.

But now...

we can strip bare an extraordinary landscape...

pull the plug from the Atlantic.

Two-and-a-half miles down...

giant walls of steel tower into the sky.

Sunlight hits her decks once more

and countless clues to the disaster start to emerge.

This is...

the drained wreck...

of the Titanic.

We've drained the Titanic...

and for the first time

we can see the ship in its entirety...

in unprecedented detail.

Now investigators can map out the site's boundaries.

And archaeologists can get an overview of a wreck

that's been hidden for over 100 years.

It's almost like the fog has been cleared away.

We can now start to see through the perpetual darkness.

The idea of draining the Titanic

presents the site in a whole different light.

It's not impenetrable.

It's right there in front of us to explore.

The Titanic's wreckage is spread out

over half a square mile of the exposed ocean floor.

An area of some 200 football fields.

The site of RMS Titanic,

it can be described pretty basically as two large features.

The bow section and the stern section...

which are about a half a mile apart,

and then numerous debris fields.

In all, there are five debris fields,

each scattered with fragments of the ship

and objects that tumbled out as she sank.

The stunning vistas unleashed by the new model

bring the Titanic back to life.

With the water stripped away, her story is laid out in plain sight.

People think science is above emotion.

You know, when you're looking at the boat deck

where you know so many people said goodbye to one another,

these are important points on that ship.

The guard rails, where on that freezing night

fathers hugged their children,

set them in the lowering lifeboats...

and leaned out to catch a final glimpse of their loved ones.

Portholes where passengers trapped below deck

saw the starry sky for the last time

as the ship slipped beneath the waves.

And even the mast of the crow's nest,

where lookout Frederick Fleet's voice shattered the silence of the night

as he first spotted the looming iceberg.

The Titanic's iconic eight-ton anchors,

still in place,

gleam in the bright daylight for the first time

in over a century.

And with the ocean now sucked dry,

her enormous bow section towers above the seabed.

Despite the violence of the sinking and all that time on the bottom,

what's inside that bow, in particular,

is still a ghostly sense of the ship that was.

Inside the bow were many of the most luxurious

of the ship's features.

The grand staircase running the height of five decks.

The heated swimming pool reserved for first-class passengers only.

And a state-of-the-art gym

positioned right up on the boat deck.

The model reveals just how intact this section of the ship really is.

Embedded in the exposed ocean floor, almost perfectly upright,

the ghostly shell of the Titanic seems to be sailing across the seabed,

her prow parting the mud almost like water.

With 40 feet of the bow above the ocean floor,

a full 60 feet must be buried.

Equivalent to a six-story building.

Using the depth to which it carved into the seabed,

investigators are refining their calculations

of the impact speed.

Its descent was very smooth.

It had its aerodynamic nose facing into the direction of travel...

so there was no tumbling.

It was not particularly violent until the very last moment.

Once separated from the rest of the ship,

the bow sank first at about 35 miles per hour

at an angle of 15 to 30 degrees.

Its impact with the sea floor

was like a gigantic 28,000-ton truck slamming into a snowdrift.

When the bow finally reached the bottom,