In the spring of 1912,
RMS Titanic slipped beneath the ocean waves.
Her disappearance is riddled with rumor and speculation.
The truth has never been completely known.
What exactly happened on that terrible night
to cause the death of one thousand five hundred and twenty-three men,
women and children?
Titanic took many secrets to her final resting place.
Now, an unprecedented scientific
expedition pieces together Titanic's final hours.
Clue by clue, evidence is being gathered.
Piece by piece, a story is beginning to unfold.
New discoveries are shattering age-old myths.
Science is taking us back in time
to witness the sinking of the unsinkable Titanic.
The French research vessel Nadir is en route to an historic spot,
some four hundred miles off the coast of North America.
Her crew is plotting a course to one
of the most notorious points in the north Atlantic...
...the site of the Titanic disaster.
The Nadir is joined by another French vessel, Ocean Voyager.
On board, an elite team of scientists and engineers,
each exploring a phase of the Titanic disaster.
Paul Matthias is a leader in underwater imaging technology.
He will try to discover the iceberg damage that doomed Titanic.
Naval architect, Bill Garzke, believes
clues to the disaster can be found in Titanic's steel.
Did Titanic's steel shatter like glass during the sinking?
David Livingstone works for the company that actually built Titanic.
He wants to know why she sank so quickly,
and why she broke in two.
Roy Cullimore is the team biologist.
He wonders if a community of deep-sea
organisms is sealing Titanic's ultimate fate.
Charles Haas and Jack Eaton are Titanic historians.
They'll provide historical context to this investigation.
Together, this team will show
why a brush with an iceberg proved
fatal to a ship built to endure such hazards.
A simple buoy and flag mark one boundary of the wreck site.
It was in these very waters that the
Titanic drama began, some eighty-five years ago.
Exploring the Titanic has been likened to conducting a technological orchestra,
with engineers, divers and scientists.
Great care is taken to prepare gear for the first dive.
On the bridge of the Nadir,
the captain guides the ship over the wreck site.
Directly below lie the remains of the greatest sunken ship of all time.
The Titanic tragedy is among the most
infamous maritime disasters in history.
On her maiden voyage to New York City,
she endured a series of events which saw her demise.
A glancing blow with an iceberg led to catastrophe.
Today, Titanic lies buried in more than twelve thousand feet of water.
Her bow and stern are separated by nearly a half a mile.
The forces that caused this destruction must have been awesome.
But the facts of that night have remained elusive,
mysterious.
The, the Titanic is a subject of a great many myths
and a great many, ah, bits of misinformation.
That's why I think this expedition is so significant,
because science is giving us the tool
to eliminate some of this misinformation
and tell what really did happen that night.
Paul Matthias is the first to explore the wreck site.
His underwater imaging technology is
being loaded onto a state-of-the-art submersible, Nautile.
This yellow submarine is one of a handful in the world
that can take humans down twelve thousand feet to the site of Titanic.
Matthias will try to uncover the iceberg damage.
Legend has it that the iceberg tore a
gaping wound into the Titanic's side
but nobody knows for sure.
After the Titanic hit the iceberg, there was enough damage to sink her.
Ah, exactly what damage occurred to the hull is not known with certainty.
The reason is a major part of the
front, of the bow of the boat is, is under the mud.
And it's been a mystery for eighty years.
Today we're gonna try to solve that by looking beneath the mud
using a seismic profiler, much like a physician might use an ultrasound.
Like a medical ultrasound, this sonar
will create images by sending and receiving acoustic signals.
Matthias hopes his signal will penetrate the mud,
enabling him to see the wound in Titanic's side.
Revealing this damage is the first step in reconstructing the disaster.
Nautile's robotic arms will be used to
position the sonar near the mud that hides the damage.
Inside the tight confines of Nautile,
there's room for three divers and a deep-sea lab.
This is the first time this kind of
approach has been used to image a hull that's buried beneath the mud.
I, I think this is, is overall gonna
give us a lot more information about the Titanic we've ever had before.
The investigation of Titanic is extremely dangerous.
More than five thousand pounds of
pressure every square inch will be exerted on the shell of Nautile.
One tiny crack in the titanium steel
would cause Nautile to instantly implode.
The waters themselves can be very hostile.
Freezing temperatures and strong currents add danger to every dive.
In the sea, divers free Nautile from her lines.
In the control room of Nadir,
the crew monitors the sub's progress
using state-of-the-art visioning software.
But if the sub gets in trouble,
there's little that can be done from Nadir.
For nearly an hour and a half,
Nautile will free fall on her way to Titanic.
Titanic was the pride of Belfast, Northern Ireland,
towering over the city where she was built.
She was nearly one hundred seventy-five feet tall
and nine hundred feet long.
In her day, she was the largest moving object ever built.
Her engines were four stories high.
Each of her three propellers were larger than a house.
Titanic's hull was comprised of more
than two thousand one-inch thick steel plates,
held together by some three million rivets.
In, in many ways, the Titanic set a,
a new standard in, in terms of her design,
especially in the area of safety.
Ah, there were the latest, uh, watertight doors,
which were, ah, um, held in place by a, a magnetic latch.
And, and simply by moving a switch,
all of these watertight doors could be closed, just by gravity.
So that even if power failed, they could be sealed.
Titanic was designed to sustain some damage.
The popular press dubbed her 'invincible' and even 'unsinkable'.
On her maiden voyage,
more than two thousand passengers and crew would board Titanic,
all confident they would reach New York safely.
Only seven hundred and five completed the journey.
In the control room on Nadir, the crew monitors Nautile's descent to Titanic.
Well, this is, ah, Paul Matthias calling from,
ah, thirty-eight hundred meters below the ocean surface.
Ah, couple of very tiny portholes up here in the front that,
ah, we're looking out of that are six inches thick.
Depth indicator says we're at, ah,
three thousand seven hundred and sixty-seven meters.
That's, ah, about two and a half miles
straight down from the ship we left about an hour and a half ago.
And I'm looking forward to seeing the bottom come up here any second now.
We're finally touched down and I can see the sandy, muddy bottom here.
It's lighted by our lights.
It would otherwise be pitch black down here.
Out of the darkness, a figure begins to slowly appear.
One of my impressions about seeing the Titanic
is the, ah, the, the majesty of it.
It's a, a gigantic ship, still upright.
And, ah, you can see what, what was
once, ah, obviously a very, ah, very impressive,
ah, very well, ah, ah, equipped, ah, sailing vessel.
Before Matthias searches for the iceberg damage,
Nautile's robotic arms are brought to life.
The pilot activates the claws and carefully clutches the sonar.
The investigation begins by recording images of visible damage.
This information will help Matthias
interpret what he finds under the mud.
Coming up on an edge here, ah, an
opening in the hull that we can pick up on the video. It's above the mudline.
Here we can see into the hull
and the same time our seismic profiler
is starting to show a, ah, a nice hyperbolic shape.
Ah, this confirms that we're starting to pick up, ah, pick up openings
in the hull with this, ah, with this system.
Very encouraging.
After collecting these baseline images,
the crew moves on to its biggest challenge,
to find the holes that sank Titanic.
The use of sonar at this depth to peer
through the mud has never been attempted.
There is no guarantee of success.
The survey takes three hours.
What will Matthias find buried beneath the mud?
The story of Titanic's destruction
begins three days into her maiden voyage.
Titanic's captain, E.J. Smith,
receives several ice warnings from other ships.
Smith alters course further south to avoid the danger,
but he still maintains Titanic's fast speed.
I can't imagine any condition that would cause a ship to founder.
Modern shipbuilding has gone beyond that. Captain Smith
Smith's confidence would soon be dashed.
Eleven-forty Sunday evening.
Lookouts high in the crow's nest spot an iceberg looming in the haze.
They ring a warning bell three times and message the bridge.
From the bridge, the Titanic is turned hard to port.
But it's too late.
Captain Smith dispatches one of the
ship's builders, Thomas Andrews, to assess the damage.
Andrews moves quickly into the ship's
forward compartments for an inspection.
What he sees is devastating.
Titanic's hull plating has been dangerously pierced by the iceberg.
While the ship was designed to survive some flooding,
Andrews finds damage in the first six compartments.
Andrews reports to Captain Smith the
ship has an hour and a half, maybe two.
The great ship Titanic is doomed.
Inquiries into the disaster try desperately to figure out how much
damage the iceberg inflicted upon Titanic.
When the, ah, investigations into Titanic's loss convened,
ah, they were faced with a problem.
Uh, the, the one person who could have told them the most about the ship
and what had happened that night, ah, Thomas Andrews, ah, was lost.
Even testimony from survivors was idled with contradictions and inconsistencies.
That is one of the difficulties in trying to determine what happened is
because as you talk to each, you look at each survivor's testimony
you'll find that each one has a
different reaction to ah, to what happened.
There was one expert at the inquiry who believed he knew what happened.
Naval architect Edward Wilding worked for the shipyard that built Titanic.
Wilding proposed the key to
understanding the damage could be found in the nature of the flooding.
Titanic flooded unevenly in six compartments.
To Wilding, this meant that each
compartment suffered its own, unique damage.
Wilding also proposed to the
investigators that the actual iceberg damage could be very, very small.
The press, however, ignored him.
Nearly everyone believed
that the only thing that could destroy
Titanic was a massive gash in her side.
The very well accepted, ah, ah, London
Graphic, uh, had a drawing of the hull,
showing, uh, fifteen feet above the keel a big, open wound.
This legend of the three hundred-foot
gash has lasted for nearly a century.
Matthias and the crew of Nautile
are retrieved from the icy north
Atlantic after nine hours of investigation.
The answer to an old mystery is now within reach.
Will they find that Titanic suffered a
giant gash or the equivalent of pinpricks?
How large was the damage that led to the ultimate destruction of the ship?
Well, here we're coming in, I'm gonna come in...
Matthias and his assistant, Steven Durzenko, comb through their data.
...right here, okay? And then right there! See that?
Okay. And we're just starting to see through the mud.
Right here.
That, that's a deformation. That's something buried in the... Can you pause right there?
All right. So what do you think that is?
Well, we have a, two small deformations,
two small distortions pretty close to each other.
Can we get a, I guess an approximate size of that?
That one's, ah, five feet, five to six feet.
And boom! Look at that. There's another one.
That looks like the same thing.
Well, it's, except it's longer.
See it? Goes from here to here?
Two more punctures are discovered in Titanic's hull.
For the next several hours, Matthias and Durzenko
identify the damage to Titanic compartment by compartment.
Then, a new and startling picture
begins to emerge with each piece of evidence.
The great ship Titanic was not torn open by a giant, gaping wound.
Just as Edward Wilding predicted,
a series of small holes caused the tragic disaster.
Okay, let's see. I have a small hole here.
As Matthias plots the cracks in Titanic's hull,
he believes much of the damage is only as thin as a human finger.
Two five five three, would be right here
and one right next to it here,
okay then we have a fifteen foot hole fifty six nine nine is here,
and two five four nine.
Okay so that's a fifteen footer that starts there and it runs back...
By being able to use our sonar, look through the mud,
we've got some indication of a small hole here near the peak,
two more small holes about five to ten
feet, fairly small here in, ah, cargo hold number one.
And we got a, ah, larger hole here that extends back.
It's on the order of, ah, fifteen feet or so.
And then we're seeing another thirty-two foot, ah, approximately
thirty-two foot separation that extends
back here into cargo hold number three.
And then finally, the biggest hole is back in boiler room number six.
Separation runs all the way across,
apparently back across this transverse bulkhead.
The night of the disaster, the iceberg
buckled Titanic's plates and popped rivets.
Incredibly, these small wounds started
a pattern of flooding that led to the demise of the great ship.
Matthias shares the news with naval architects Garzke and Livingstone.
Not a continuous sort of zipper or gash,
not a long three hundred foot-type of opening.
Now other questions are being raised.
With such a small amount of damage,
just how did Titanic sink so quickly?
Here in the very place where Titanic was built,
naval architects are unraveling the
mystery of why Titanic sank so fast.
How did such minor damage cause the
unsinkable ship to founder in just over two hours?
Working many long hours, two researchers have recreated the sinking,
relying on Edward Wilding's testimony about the flooding.
Right. What have we got?
Hello, John...
Naval architects John Bedford and Chris Hackett
have created a computer model that uses many of Wilding's calculations.
They agree with Wilding that Titanic was not torn wide open.
...and that the damage totals a mere twelve square feet,
the equivalent surface area of an average-sized person.
And I found that, ah, the media and the literature on the subject
was so full of misleading information,
ah, that, ah, I began to get, ah, interested.
And the more we looked at it,
then the more surprising things that we found.
Their scenario begins at eleven-forty.
Bedford and Hackett calculate that immediately after impact,
the water is rushing in at almost seven tons per second.
Titanic was designed to sustain some flooding.
But with six compartments flooding simultaneously,
all safety gear was rendered useless.
Just ten minutes after the collision,
most of the damaged compartments are filled to the top.
According to the, ah, inquiry report,
we've got the mailroom afloat, which brings it up to twenty-four feet.
Unaware of the danger they're in, five men dragging mail to higher
ground get caught in the intense flooding,
and drown.
We can then go on another ten minutes to midnight.
The water's risen to G deck through number one hatch.
In a mere twenty minutes after impact,
passengers walking along the promenade comment that
they suddenly feel as if they're walking downhill.
By midnight, Bedford and Hackett
estimate that the ship had taken on eight thousand tons of water.
But based on the figures after twenty minutes, at twelve-twenty...
Twelve-twenty, forty minutes after the collision.
The bow is only fifteen feet away from being submerged.
The first two lifeboats are launched. But they are not filled.
People still cannot comprehend that the ship is going under.
And that's it there.
We've still no water at all, really in number four.
And everything is flooded now to the waterline, except number five.
The, the bow is submerged. You can see that.
One hour after the iceberg strike,
all damaged compartments are filled to the waterline.
Bedford and Hackett estimate that
Titanic has now taken on twenty-five thousand tons of water.
Captain Smith knows time is running out.
He orders distress rockets to be fired.
Radio operators frantically signal for help, all in vain.
Okay. She's still stable. So we can carry on flooding four...
At one-forty, two hours after impact,
the situation turns even more grim.
Brave crewmen who had been supplying
power to the ship's lights now scramble for their lives.
More compartments flood, pulling the bow under water.
The giant stern heaves up into the night sky.
In just over two hours, Titanic is lost.
We can carry on filling up and we'll
see if that's sufficient to sink her.
Uh, and it is. And away she goes. That's it.
So that's twenty past two.
That's her sunk.
More than fifteen hundred people were still on the ship as she went down.
One of the greatest marvels of her time was sent into the blackness of
the sea by some twelve square feet of damage.
At the time, she was the biggest, she was the best,
she could beat nature.
She could go through an ice flow,
she could hit an iceberg. She was unsinkable.
She was fast, she was big,
but she was a pimple on the ocean.
Nature could knock her aside and dead.
The Titanic represented a time of great optimism.
It was believed that technology reigned supreme over nature.
When the great ship set sail,
no one was concerned that there were not enough lifeboats on board.
But after this incredible disaster,
safety philosophy would change forever.
Today we know unsinkable ships cannot be built.
Designs now focus on keeping vessels
afloat just long enough to be abandoned.
Okay. First, um, the signal abandon, or distress signal...
Drills are mandatory and help ensure quick evacuation.
Get your gear and...
...and, and meet down on the next
floor, where all the safety rafts are.
Modern ships also carry enough lifeboats for all on board.
This was not the case with Titanic.
Anyway, since the Titanic, there is,
there is enough, ah, room in the life raft for everybody.
Survival suits like this one are provided to all passengers.
They offer protection against freezing seas.
Most of Titanic's casualties did not die from drowning,
but rather from exposure to ice-cold water.
The deep sea is a new frontier.
Few people have traveled to the
dangerous depths of twelve thousand feet.
Prototype submersibles like Nautile have opened up other worlds.
But despite more than a decade of
visits to Titanic, there is still much to learn.
To biologist Roy Cullimore, Titanic is like another planet,
teeming with mysterious microbial life.
And that was only five percent of the microorganisms on this planet
that have ever been described or identified.
Five percent.
We tend to think of the earth as a surface.
We live on the surface or close to the surface,
and the birds fly overhead, the trees grow in the soil.
The water laps at the beaches,
and ah we don't realize there are many
biological universes on this planet that we don't see.
Cullimore believes that Titanic is
now home to a giant community of microbes.
What we've got to do is find new
techniques to find these organisms and get them to grow
so that we get a broader picture of the organisms around them.
Titanic is one site.
He believes the organisms are actually eating Titanic.
Cullimore is building biological traps
to capture and identify the bacteria that reside on the wreck.
A strip of thirty five millimeter film is the bait.
Film is made with gelatin which is food for bacteria.
You see you're doing it much better. No no no no.
The bottom of the tube is baited with food that's rich in iron.
And what they're going to do is they are going to mind the film.
They're going to try and take the film, the gelatin off
and so they are going to tunnel, they are going to etch it away.
And then we're hopefully going to see some beautiful patterns.
Because science isn't just science, it is also art.
So what we do is then put this down...
Cullimore hopes to collect bacteria that prefer the iron.
As these bacteria remove the iron from
Titanic, they build these elaborate rust like structures dubbed, rusticles.
Cullimore believes that the
iron-consuming bacteria are the main culprits devouring Titanic.
The ship is starting to disintegrate.
And it's at disintegration because the
rusticles are sucking more and more iron out of the steel,
and now the ship cannot support itself.
So gradually, she's going to go in,
which means the integrity, the
structure of the ship, one day will collapse.
What Cullimore hopes to do is
determine how much of the Titanic has
been eaten by the microbe infested rusticles.
What frustrates me is, how fast are they growing?
How fast are they extracting the iron from the plates of the Titanic?
How long will the Titanic last?
As Cullimore prepares to gauge the ultimate fate of Titanic,
naval architects David Livingstone
and Bill Garzke look back to the night of the disaster.
They're kilometers away. And we took it round...
Now that they know the true iceberg damage and the pattern of flooding,
they are beginning to grapple with one more puzzling mystery.
How did Titanic break into pieces on calm seas?
This is a really jumbled mass of twisted metal, pipe, cable, wires.
You name it, it's there. And it's all crushed up together.
That's, ah, that's another, it's, it's...
That's unbelievable.
...it's not a very inviting place at all.
It, it's almost like a giant has ripped it apart.
I mean, it's, it looks that way.
When, ah, the revelation came that,
the, ah, the ship was, ah, broken in, in two,
ah, it was absolutely astounding to us,
ah, because of the weight, the
credence that we had given the historical reports,
and in particular the, the two
investigations that had found that the ship had sank largely intact.
In testimony, all the surviving officers said Titanic sank intact.
Others saw the ship break into pieces.
Why does history offer such a puzzling account filled with inconsistencies?
There are almost as many interpretations and, ah, depictions of the breakup,
ah, as there are people who, uh, gave the testimony.
Survivor Jack Thayer had a sketch made
and reproduced on the front page of the Philadelphia Bulletin,
that clearly shows the ship breaking at the surface.
Other testimony depicts the ship breaking when it was underwater.
The controversy is if the vessel breaks at the surface,
did it break on the way down,
or did it break when it got to the ocean bottom.
David Livingstone will be searching
the wreck site for clues to the breakup.
It's squiggly. The A-frame is gonna
take you back and once you do that...
Last-minute advice is given by expedition organizers.
Once you're locked into that pen
and they've decided that these right...
Never before has a naval architect explored the Titanic.
Besides being a naval architect, ah,
I think any engineer would be fascinated.
Whether we will ever know precisely, ah, what happened,
ah, I re... I doubt that.
I think we can make a guess at what
might have happened and in the order in which it might happen.
As Livingstone sinks to the Titanic,
the crew on board Ocean Voyager
prepares some unique equipment to aid in his dive.
Four specially designed underwater
light towers will shine a blazing spotlight on the wreck.
The towers generate light power
equivalent to thirty-five thousand household bulbs.
One-half ton of chain will carry the
lights to the bottom of the north Atlantic.
Giant lift bags will pull the lights
back to the surface once the chains are released.
At the Titanic, Livingstone's first task
is to place the biological experiments
of Roy Cullimore on the wreckage of the bridge.
So, those are some instruments and tests that we have to place,
ah, um, and it's suggested that they are placed on the bridge.
But at an area where, where there should be a lot of corrosion,
so that they, ah, the scientists can
see what is happening and what sort of interactions there are.
The experiments will remain here for several days
in order to give the bacteria time to gorge on the bait inside.
Livingstone slowly moves from the bow to the stern.
At the stern, the crew uses Nautile's