3D Titanic scan reveals never-before-known details of ship’s final hours

The revolutionary scan is providing new insights into the doomed ocean liner's final moments, including damage caused by the collision with the iceberg.

A revolutionary digital scan of the Titanic is providing new insights into the doomed ocean liner’s final moments, showing how the ship ripped in two and sank to the ocean floor.

The first-ever full-sized 3D scan of the Titanic wreck, captured by deep-sea mapping company Magellan in partnership with Atlantic Productions, reveals remarkable new details about the ship’s structure and the damage it incurred when it hit an iceberg in the Atlantic Ocean and began to take on water.

The digital scans reveal a new view of the boiler room where the ship split in two, showing some of the boilers as concave, which suggests they were still operating as they plunged into the frigid water.

A detailed computer simulation accompanying the scan also shows that the iceberg didn’t create massive gashes but rather a series of small punctures — each about the size of an A4 sheet of paper. The punctures were spread across six watertight compartments, while the Titanic was only designed to stay afloat with four compartments flooded.

“Titanic is the last surviving eyewitness to the disaster, and she still has stories to tell,” Titanic analyst Parks Stephenson told the BBC.

“Having a comprehensive view of the entirety of the wreck site is key to understanding what happened here.”

The news comes as the scan was studied for a new documentary by National Geographic and Atlantic Productions called Titanic: The Digital Resurrection. (The documentary premieres Friday on National Geographic and will begin streaming the following day on Disney+.)

“I felt there was something much bigger here that we could get from the Titanic,” Anthony Geffen, the CEO of Atlantic Production, told CBS News in 2023, when the first images from the mapping project were released. “If we could scan it, if we could capture in all its detail … we could find out how it sank and how the different parts of the boat fell apart and we can find a lot of personal stories down there as well.”