Robotic arm to drag the deep sea light towers into position.
We have just moved away a little bit
and we have asked to commander to
turn on exterior lights to, to the submarine.
Ah. This is beautiful.
Yeah, yeah.
Very, very portal-like. This is the first time.
Now I can see this engine.
A veil of darkness is removed and
Titanic's massive four-story engines are revealed.
The rubble surrounding the engines is
all that remains of the stern's once great decks.
Livingstone begins to inspect the jagged edges and confusing shadows
for clues to the breakup.
To his trained eye, the engines seem to have snapped in half.
The port engine, the fact that the,
ah, the, one of the cylinders, ah, has broken off
indicates some of the very immense
forces, ah, that were acting, ah, on the hull at that time.
The, this, the engine itself was a massive structure.
Both engines, ah, together weighed some two thousand six hundred tons.
But the fact that such a big piece of,
of engine, ah, has just disappeared, ah, and quite cleanly,
um, indicates some of the forces that were at work during the sinking.
It appears to Livingstone that Titanic
broke here, between two of the engines.
But he still doesn't know how or why she broke.
Nearly two and half hours after the
collision, as the last of the lifeboats are being lowered,
forces are building to tear Titanic to pieces.
Second Officer Charles Lightoller is a witness to the beginning of the end.
Just then, the ship took a slight but definite plunge.
Those that didn't disappear underwater
right away instinctively started to
climb toward the stern, which was rising steadily out of the water.
I knew only too well the utter
futility of struggling towards the stern.
There was only one thing to do.
Striking the water was like a thousand
knives being driven into one's body.
As Lightoller and others struggle for their lives,
Titanic comes closer to total destruction.
From the icy seas, Lightoller describes an astonishing drama.
The bow of the ship was now rapidly going down
and the stern rising higher and higher out of the water.
The terrific strain of bringing the
after end of that huge hull out of the water
opened the expansion joint near number one funnel,
causing the funnel to fall...
missing me by inches.
From the water, Lightoller saw the ship coming apart.
But his harrowing account does not
explain Titanic's mangled condition today.
David Livingstone returns from Titanic with more questions than answers.
One of the surprising things was the way in which the vessel got broken up.
There doesn't appear to be a pattern.
Uh, one panel of steel is bent one way.
Its neighboring panel is bent another way.
And no one, simple explanation can
explain just all the forces that were happening to the ship.
While Livingstone grapples with the
puzzle of how Titanic tore to pieces...
Bill Garzke's colleagues in the United
States may be on the verge of some answers.
Piece by piece, a virtual Titanic is being built.
Okay. So when you're building a finite
element model, if you start off bulkhead by bulkhead...
The computer model is based on key information from the expedition,
as well as some of the ship's design plans.
So what we have here is the Titanic
and, or the beginning of the, the
finite element model of the Titanic.
This modern engineering tool can begin
to reveal the escalating forces that acted on Titanic's hull.
We've actually added A deck.
And lastly, there's the boat deck.
For the very first time, researchers can begin to calculate the forces
that impacted Titanic before she broke.
The stresses within the ship are shown with a spectrum of colors.
Red represents the most severe.
The team first looks at the stresses within Titanic on calm seas.
I don't see very many stresses in that.
But as the wounded ship fills with
water, the stresses in the midsection increase dramatically.
Wow! What is that?
This is the ship, uh, just prior to breakup.
It's taken on a lot of water in the bow
and that rapid change causes the stresses to increase.
So, basically our ship is bending.
The forward end of the ship is, is flooded.
The, the top part of the ship is pulling apart in tension.
The, the, the bottom or the keel of the ship is compressing.
And the steel plates in the keel are actually buckling.
As the bow pulls down, the huge stern rises in the air,
the equivalent of a twenty-five story
building suddenly looming above the water.
The stresses that we have in the deck
are on the order of thirty-five thousand pounds per square inch.
And that's about fifty percent higher
than what the Titanic was actually designed for.
The myriad of stresses within Titanic
were so enormous that they overwhelmed the ship.
Perhaps most revealing, the model
helps to support eyewitness testimony
that Titanic broke apart on the surface.
I heard explosions, a sort of rumbling sound.
I imagined the decks had blown up with
the pressure pulling the boat down.
Major Arthur Peuchen
You could see a propeller right clear.
And you could see underneath the keel.
You could see part of the keel. Joseph Scaret.
And her lights went dim, as she broke
clean in two. Steward Frederick Crowe
There was no sound for what seemed like hours.
And then the cries for help, which
seemed to go on, forever. Emily Ryerson.
The next clue in the great ship's demise
is being pulled from the ocean bottom.
Today, a piece of Titanic steel is raised to the surface.
As the historic relic rises over the Nadir,
a sense of awe and reverence is felt among the crew.
Titanic's steel has its own story to
tell after nearly a century of burial at sea.
The night of the disaster, many
survivors claim they heard incredible noises,
awful and frightening sounds.
In the case of Titanic,
you're talking about thousands of
square feet of plate that are being mutilated and torn
and giving off a tremendous amount of noise.
Is it possible that the noises heard
that night were Titanic's steel plates shattering like glass?
To answer this question, a key piece of evidence is headed for America.
To reconstruct what may have happened,
Titanic's steel has come here to be dissected and analyzed.
And the next one?
Under the guidance of metallurgist Professor H.P. Laylie,
a team will test to see if Titanic's steel is especially brittle.
A small sample is cut and loaded into a scanning electron microscope.
Metallurgist Chris Ramsey and Scott Miller
peer deep into the steel's microstructure.
There's ferrite, perlite, lots of
inclusions. Let's focus it real fast
and then go back down in magnification to see what we have.
They are looking for potential
weaknesses and defects in the steel.
Go to a little higher magnification shot.
Okay. Lots of ferrite, perlite. Big inclusions. That's a big one.
Probably be, go with manganese sulfide.
That's a big one. Big manganese sulfide.
As they suspected, the steel is full
of large manganese sulfide inclusions,
chemical imperfections that create
weak areas which cause the steel to be brittle.
Such was usually the case for steel produced in the early 20th Century.
Steels around the turn of the century were made in very small lots,
maybe seventy tons, whereas today we
make them in four hundred ton batches.
Quality control was not, was a problem in those days.
Certainly compared to today's steels, this is inferior.
But for the steels at the time, it was
probably about as good as they could do.
We got pearlite.
We wouldn't want to build ships out of this stuff today.
At the time the Titanic was built,
no one suspected that these chemical
impurities could make steel fragile under extreme conditions.
Investigators suspect that the extreme
cold water temperatures of the north Atlantic
caused the steel to become even more brittle.
The waters of April 14 to 15, 1912,
are unusually cold for the Atlantic at that time of year.
Twenty-eight degree sea water is not
the ordinary sea water you'll find in April.
H.P. Laylie chills a bar of Titanic
steel to the water temperature the night of the disaster.
The sample will be subjected to a violent impact.
The fractured piece of Titanic is sent to another lab
to be examined by mineral scientist Timothy Foecke.
I find it quite exciting to be able
to work on, ah, steel from the Titanic,
to be able to look at the mystery of
what all went together to contribute to the sinking.
Foecke's tests confirm that Titanic
steel, with its weak manganese sulfide areas,
became more brittle when subjected to the cold temperatures.
The fracture surface shows,
ninety-five percent of the grains in the sample cracked.
The lines of the fracture trace back
to the weak spots in almost every case.
And so you see the effect of manganese
sulfide particles on the fracture behavior of the steel.
More or less when you take the steel down to a lower temperature,
you're actually shattering something that's just full of holes.
The night of the disaster, as Titanic begins to break,
it's likely that much of the ship's steel suffered brittle fracture.
This new evidence supports what some survivors heard.
Nobody knows for sure what happened to Titanic once she dipped beneath
the waves and headed for the ocean floor.
Researchers want to know how the bow escaped relatively unscathed.
The stern, on the other hand, is completely destroyed.
Decks are curled back. The hull is in shambles.
What happened to the stern on her way down to the bottom?
We don't have a real fine, ah, understanding of what happened as
the ship sank from the water surface down to the seabed,
because of the myriad of forces that are involved here.
It's a fan... a fantastic contrast,
cause the forward end actually looks like a ship.
David Livingstone and Bill Garzke are trying to reconstruct what
happened to the bow and the stern once they slipped beneath the surface.
It, it still looks very much like a, a, like a...
Like a ship.
The railings are there. Fantastic shadows.
They believe that as the bow dropped, it was already filled with water,
so it was not crushed by the increasing water pressure.
The bow actually is, is in good condition compared to the stern
because of the equalization of
pressure, ah, during the sinking process at the surface.
Ah, the model is not strictly correct.
Livingstone believes that the wreck
site holds clues to how the bow arrived in its final position.
On the starboard side, there is this
big wave, almost a bow wave of silt
and that's where this, the, the ship was pushing in.
And there is, ah, ah, and the anchor
is, ah, and the bottom of the anchor is just about on the silt.
I see.
Another clue to the bow's impact is found on the port side.
Over, over the top of the bridge and...
To Livingstone's surprise, there's a giant bend in the hull.
Ah, the rig really is bent.
The bend in the port side in the hull,
um, it certainly took me by surprise.
The condition ah, of the hull in that area where it, it had bent right,
ah, right around a hundred and eighty degrees
and a radius of, ah, perhaps about three meters.
And the hull hadn't fractured.
Ah, the, the plates were intact.
What, ah, could have happened, uh,
Bill, was that the ship was sinking nose down...
Nose down.
...sideways at the same time.
And then buried itself in, into the silt.
The back end, just with the momentum of the steel and all the entrained
water in it, just wanted to keep going...
...and squashed up.
Right. Now, that sounds plausible.
It just, it just, ah, it just actually
concertinaed and, and made this big buckle.
Yes. That is, I think, just about there.
Understanding how the stern arrived
on the bottom is a bit more puzzling.
...ah, it was number four, which we
had placed in the O2 days earlier.
The stern wreckage is chaotic.
This, too, is an important clue.
Livingstone and Garzke think that
after the bow pulls the stern under water,
the bow and stern separate.
The incredible pressure on air trapped
inside the stern causes inward implosions.
Yeah. This may be sound, ah, this in the center here...
To Livingstone's trained eyes, Titanic's propellers
provide clues as to how the stern finally landed on the bottom.
The propellers are curiously bent upwards,
which suggest that the aft end of the stern hit the bottom first.
And it would almost look as if the
aft end hit the bottom, ah, just dropping like a stone.
Hit the bottom, which is very hard mud.
And then would have stopped in a rather short time.
And that would cause classic shock damage.
Anything that was not well attached would break loose.
It took some fifteen thousand people two years to build Titanic.
She was made with more than twenty-five thousand tons of steel,
and her engines produced nearly fifty thousand horsepower.
But the forces of nature simply tore
the greatest ship of her day to pieces in a matter of minutes and
spread them out across the ocean floor.
Surprisingly, the scattered pieces are not fully mapped.
Their final location will now be recorded for history.
Over the past several days the crew of
Nadir has been busy modifying Nautile.
The submersible is outfitted with
another of Paul Matthias' sonar devices.
Matthias will attempt a first.
Using new software technology,
he will try to create the first
archaeological map of the entire wreck site,
which is almost one square mile.
Well, the Titanic is a huge ship.
It's bigger than anything we've ever imaged.
It's one giant, ah, behemoth on the ocean floor.
There has never been a routine detailed survey of the Titanic.
Preparation for this investigation began half a world away
in the warm, shallow waters off the coast of Greece.
Matthias was here to fine-tune his imaging technology
on Titanic's identical twin, Britanic,
which sank two years after Titanic during World War I.
Sonar image quality largely depends
on how close the fish can get to the wreck.
As the fish passes over the site, it sends out an acoustic signal.
The signal rebounds off the ship and the software creates an image.
In a matter of hours, Britanic is
revealed lying on her side on the ocean bottom.
Next, Matthias validates what he saw
in his ghostly images with an eye-witness inspection of Britanic.
By fine-tuning his software here in the shallow seas,
he increases his chances of capturing
an image of Titanic in extremely deep waters.
Matthias confirms much of what his sonar imaged
...the railings on the bow...
...the promenade deck...
...the great hole caused by her
sinking during the First World War...
...and even her massive propeller.
Matthias leaves Greece with high hopes for Titanic.
Compared to the warm waters of the Mediterranean,
the north Atlantic is deep and dangerous.
The weather here is now turning for the worst.
There's no guarantee that Matthias
will succeed in this inhospitable environment.
On his way to Titanic, Matthias prepares his imaging software.
Thirty feet above the wreck,
the team begins scanning the area
in a process called mowing the lawn.
What we're doing now is we're scanning
across the seabed in the Nautile with a sonar,
looking out to six hundred feet on either side.
And we're building up a picture of the seabed.
A routine survey has never been done in the area.
This is the first tape of, ah, side
scan data over the Titanic taken by a submarine.
We've also collected the data on, ah, optical disk on the computer.
That one's at twenty-three-forty-seven.
Matthias and Durzenko now begin to plot out
the first archaeological map of the Titanic wreck site.
Wow. Look at that. Look at that.
That's got to be it.
That's the bow.
For the first time, the entire bow can be seen on the ocean floor.
That's a nice image. That's a really nice image.
The stern is also revealed.
The broken end of the stern is right here.
Yeah. Look at that.
Looks like it's bent right here.
The sonar mapping has even turned up a surprise.
That is a big piece of the hull right there.
When Titanic broke in half, she was severed in two places,
creating a third piece, most of which disintegrated.
Now, recorded on videotape and plotted
on the map, some sixty feet of her hull has been discovered intact.
Researchers believe the other half of
Titanic's massive engine is under this piece.
Further explorations of the site may provide the answer.
Okay, Steve. Um, got the tip of the bow at five-seven-one-seven.
Gradually, a map of the whole wreck
site emerges, as they first position the bow and stern.
...five-seven. Okay.
And the propeller end of the stern is five-one-seven-zero.
The sonar data has also outlined two other important areas.
And we're also getting debris patterns.
Within these circles lay most of the artifacts from the Titanic disaster.
Scattered across the ocean bottom are
objects that poured from Titanic as she sank.
Each defines the ship's character and tells another part of her story.
Many of Titanic's treasures find their
way to the French countryside, where they are restored.
A protective coat of polish is applied to one of the ship's whistles,
last heard at high noon on the very day Titanic struck the iceberg.
This was Titanic's voice.
This is what made her speak, the whistles.
And there they are. We have them. We know what they're like.
It's one thing reading about them. But to see them?
Gives you an entirely different impression of what they were.
Stephane Pennec belongs to a group of conservation artisans,
each with their own unique specialty.
As a trained archaeologist,
Pennec carefully supervises the preservation of Titanic's artifacts.
Master woodworker Thierry Palanc meticulously reconstructs the
wooden base of one the ship's compasses.
Each retrieved object becomes an
integral part of a new and historical record.
I think human couldn't live without
having, ah, their own roots and culture.
It's probably the main difference
between animals and, and human people.
The artisans take a minimalist approach to conservation.
For them, the objects are more
meaningful if they keep a trace of the trauma they suffered.
A ceramic figurine.
Sea water can pull a glossy surface away from its base.
Chemical treatments and air drying will stabilizing the cracking.
In the hands of Marielle Boucharat,
a simple souvenir from Holland is
transformed into an object of poignant beauty.
Intricate metal latticework that adorned Titanic deck benches
now soak in tubs of chemicals.
Pennec monitors the bath for chloride,
a leading cause of corrosion in metals.
Each object reacts differently when exposed to the sea.
Pennec calls on an eclectic background to save the Titanic artifacts.
So in term of training, you have to be
able to understand chemics, physics, turbulation processes.
You have to be able to understand the
term of history, art, what the, meaning of the object.
You can't restore a, a clock or a, or a car if, if you don't know a
bit of, of the techniques involved in it.
Isabelle Sellier-Colson puts the tiny components back into a clock...
...a clock that froze in time on April 15th, 1912.
Remarkably, a man's suitcase was recovered from the ocean's floor.
Martine Plantec carefully unfolds the garments.
Dirt and oxides are washed away from the pants, gloves and shirts
that were so neatly folded and packed for a trip to America so long ago.
The unpacking action is one of the
strongest feeling of, of the conservation processes,
because that's the time where you do the, what should have been.
When you arrive from, from a trip, you unpack your, your stuff.
And, ah, in fact, you, we, we, just switch.
It's, it's, the, the guy can't unpack now.
And we are the next one.
It's very strong in term of emotion.
Of all Titanic objects being preserved here in France,
perhaps the most incredible ones are made of paper.
I think it's unbelievable.
If you, if, if you had to bet about that,
no, no one will bet about having paper being able to be, to be recovered.
Living treasures of music sheets, bank notes, letters and diaries survive
because they were stuffed away inside leather bags,
protected from the elements.
Today, these personal writings remind us of lives lost.
Roy sends best wishes.
Wishes he was traveling like you.
I wish you prosperity wherever you go. Your sincerely, Misses Shuttle
Hello, Roy. Wishing you a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year.
Hope to hear from you in the New Year. Sidney
I am just living from day to day for the time when you will be back.
I could not be untrue even if I wanted to.
When we put the picture together, when
we look at the objects that these people had in their final moments,
it gives us, I think, a greater
understanding of just exactly who they were.
And by knowing the characters in the drama,
you get a much better insight into the, the great drama of that night.
In all, some five thousand Titanic artifacts have been recovered.
Many can now be seen in exhibits throughout the world.
Each reaches out in an intimate human way to keep the memory of Titanic alive.
The Titanic herself can be considered the ultimate artifact.
But the ship can never be raised, never preserved.
And unlike the artifacts conserved in France,
Titanic is disappearing rapidly,
with no practical chance at restoration.
At the Titanic's site, Roy Cullimore is retreating his rusticle traps.
There may be clues to the Titanic's
ultimate fate inside these tiny vials.
And maybe we're approaching the time
when the Titanic is going to become very fragile and,
uh, we need to know how fragile she is becoming.
The rusticle structures are extremely
delicate, and they are collected gingerly.
One day, Titanic too may crumble away.
Back in his lab, Cullimore is quick to get to work.
Etchings in a strip of thirty five
millimeter film show signs of bacteria.
These trails were created as the
bacteria ate the gelatin in the film.
For Cullimore, these colorful etchings
are signs of vigorous life at the Titanic's site.
Cullimore discovers many different kinds of bacteria.
The solutions in the red cap tubes
show discoloration, proving the existence of iron eating bacteria.
Cullimore confirms that iron bacteria are devouring Titanic.
It's a complicated living system and it's not just one species.
We've already isolated a number of
community structures of bacteria from that.
Inside the hard shell of the rusticle,
Cullimore has found bacteria, fungi and other mold.
He injects nutrients into a rusticle to keep it alive.
He hopes to discover how they create their unique outer shell.
The anatomy of the rusticle is complicated.
These life forms embody a web of water channels, ducts and cavities.
The amount of surface area packed into the rusticles is astonishing.
The size of the rusticles is fascinating from the point of
view that the rusticle has such a huge surface area.
If I took six hundred and fifty tons of rusticles on the bow of the Titanic,
spread the surface area, it would
cover twenty three thousand square miles of surface area.
So essentially we're seeing there is a complex community.
We don't understand all the components.
This is a new part of science
that we're only just beginning to
explore. The edge of yet another universe.
Cullimore extracts some of Titanic's
iron each time he dries out a sample of rusticle.
Judging from the amount of iron collected,
he believes that as much as twenty
percent of the bow has been consumed by the organisms.
And from the philosophical point of
view, what I see there is, we're seeing the inevitability.
Everything recycles, absolutely everything.
Today, the story of Titanic is moving into her final chapter.
The most luxurious ocean liner in the world is slowly disintegrating,
transforming to dust and iron ore.
By exploring Titanic before it's too late,
the story of her tragedy is kept alive.
In the light of morning, the survivors of the Titanic disaster found
themselves adrift in the cold north Atlantic.
Seven hundred and five people had
survived the cold and dark in lifeboats.
Twenty-eight men stood until they were rescued on this upside-down boat,
often huddled together in prayer.
The passenger ship Carpathia rescued many survivors that morning.
While the rest of the world waited to hear what had happened,
most survivors were silent...
...quiet,
stunned.
They would complete their voyage to
New York, but nothing had turned out as planned.
In Titanic's giant berth, her
lifeboats replaced where the great ship should have been.
A place of joyous arrival was instead a reminder of tragic loss.
Tragically, a lot of people lost their lives on the Titanic.
And I don't think we should dwell on
the tragedy so much as learn from the tragedy
so that it doesn't happen again.
And the Titanic maintains an elegance, as if she's saying to us
'don't avoid me but learn from me.
Don't avoid tragedies but learn from tragedies. '
Nearly a century ago, the Titanic disaster shocked the world.
Even today, we still struggle to
understand the events of that night.
Science has given us a way to go back in time,
to replace myth with fact,
to develop new theories
and to reconstruct a defining moment of the 20th Century.
We've accomplished a lot on this operation.
We've imaged the hull beneath the mudline
and detected the damage caused by the iceberg.
Ah, because again, the crack was
coming, the crack was coming this way.
And we know perhaps a little better
what the mystery of Titanic is all about.
It's a question of, ah, steel.
Question of naval architecture
exceeding the limits of what the, ship was designed for.
That's why she sank,
exceeding the limits of what she was designed for.
History is enriched by new discoveries.
And the story of Titanic lives on
with each new retelling of her tragic tale.
Every expedition, really, contributes new information.
But I think this one, ah, really is,
is contributing, ah, solid, reliable information,
not only in terms of the present
condition, but by extension, what the ship's future condition would be
as well as what happened in the past.
Titanic represented not so much the end of an era.
Titanic represented the pause and the reflection that,
well, maybe we're not so great as we thought we were.
But I'll tell you what.
It's not gonna happen again.
The lessons of Titanic still resonate with meaning.
Even to this day, the story of this
great ship can still touch our hearts.
And so, I looked at the ship as she's looming up.
And I thought, 'Here is a gray lady,
an elegant lady, the queen of the deep.
A sad lady, a silent lady, are you now asleep?
Can we learn from your sorrow to share?
Teach us to understand and certainly to care.
But never again will there ever be a gray lady, an elegant lady,
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