The Titanic disaster has been revealed in extraordinary detailed images after researchers have pieced together what is believed to be the first comprehensive map of the entire 3-by-5-mile Titanic debris field.
Researchers hope it will provide new clues about what exactly happened on that fateful night 100 years ago when the superliner hit an iceberg and plunged to the bottom of the North Atlantic, killing more than 1,500 people.
An expedition team used sonar imaging and more than 100,000 photos taken from underwater robots to create the map, which shows where hundreds of objects and pieces of the presumed-unsinkable vessel landed.
Marks on the muddy ocean bottom suggest that the stern rotated like a helicopter blade as the ship sank, rather than plunging straight down.
Explorers of the Titanic – which sank on its maiden voyage from Southampton, England, to New York City – have known for more than 25 years where the bow and stern landed after the vessel struck an iceberg.
But previous maps of the floor around the wreckage were incomplete, said Parks Stephenson, a Titanic historian who consulted on the 2010 expedition. Studying the site with old maps was like trying to navigate a dark room with a weak flashlight.
“With the sonar map, it’s like suddenly the entire room lit up and you can go from room to room with a magnifying glass and document it,” Parks Stephenson said.
“Nothing like this has ever been done for the Titanic site.”
The mapping took place in the summer of 2010 during an expedition to the Titanic led by RMS Titanic Inc., the legal custodian of the wreck, along with Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Falmouth, Massachusetts, and the Waitt Institute of La Jolla, California.
They were joined by the cable History channel and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and the National Park Service is also involved in the mapping.
Details on the new findings at the bottom of the ocean are not being revealed yet, but the network will air them in a two-hour documentary on April 15, exactly 100 years after the Titanic sank.
The expedition team ran two independently self-controlled robots known as autonomous underwater vehicles along the ocean bottom day and night.
The torpedo-shaped AUV’s surveyed the site with side-scan sonar, moving at a little more than three miles per hour as they traversed back and forth in a grid along the bottom.
The AUV’s also took high-resolution photos – 130,000 of them in all – of a smaller 2-by-3-mile area where most of the debris was concentrated.
The images were stitched together on a computer to provide a detailed photo mosaic of the debris.
The result is a map that looks something like the moon’s surface showing debris scattered across the ocean floor well beyond the large bow and stern sections that rest about half a mile apart.
The map provides a forensic tool with which scientists can examine the wreck site much the way an airplane wreck would be investigated on land.
For instance, the evidence that the stern rotated is based on the marks on the ocean floor to its west and the fact that virtually all the debris is found to the east.
“When you look at the sonar map, you can see exactly what happened,” said Paul-Henry Nargeolet, the expedition’s co-leader with RMS Titanic.
The first mapping of the Titanic wreck site began after it was discovered in 1985, using photos taken with cameras aboard a remotely controlled vehicle that didn’t venture far from the bow and stern.
The mapping over the years has improved as explorers have built upon previous efforts in piecemeal fashion, said Charlie Pellegrino, a Titanic explorer who was not involved in the 2010 expedition.
But this is the first time a map of the entire debris field has looked at every square inch in an orderly approach, he said.
“This is quite a significant map,” Charlie Pellegrino said.
“It’s quite a significant advance in the technology and the way it’s done.”
At Lone Wolf Documentary Group in South Portland, producers are putting the final touches on the History documentary. Rushmore DeNooyer, the co-producer and writer of the show, points out the different items on the map, displayed on a screen.
They include a huge tangle of the remains of a deckhouse; a large chunk of the side of the ship measuring more than 60 feet long and weighing more than 40 tons; pieces of the ship’s bottom; and a hatch cover that blew off of the bow section as it crashed to the bottom.
Other items include five of the ship’s huge boilers, a revolving door and even a lightning rod from a mast.
By examining the debris, investigators can now answer questions like how the ship broke apart, how it went down and whether there was a fatal flaw in the design, he said.
The layout of the wreck site and where the pieces landed provide new clues on exactly what happened. Computer simulations will re-enact the sinking in reverse, bringing the wreckage debris back to the surface and reassembled.
Some of those questions will be answered on the show, said Dirk Hoogstra, a senior vice president at History. He declined to say ahead of the show what new theories are being put forth on the sinking.
“We’ve got this vision of the entire wreck that no one has ever seen before,” Dirk Hoogstra said.
“Because we have, we’re going to be able to reconstruct exactly how the wreck happened. It’s groundbreaking, jaw-dropping stuff.”
Hostages Chris McManus and Franco Lamolinara killed by the Nigerian captors, after SBS rescue operation failed
British Chris McManus and Italian Franco Lamolinara, who were taken hostages in Nigeria, have been killed by their captors yesterday when a UK Special Forces rescue operation ended in tragedy.
Chris McManus and Franco Lamolinara have been executed by gunmen as members of the Special Boat Service and Nigerian soldiers moved in on the Al Qaeda-inspired terrorists’ hideaway.
Chris McManus and Franco Lamolinara had been held for ten months.
Fears for Christopher McManus’s welfare had intensified following the release of a video in August showing the 28-year-old engineer blindfolded alongside three armed men.
One of the terrorists said it would be the “last message” to David Cameron about the hostage.
Yesterday, British PM David Cameron broke the news of the execution to Chris McManus’s family in a personal phone call before making a public statement in which he appeared emotional.
It is the second time David Cameron has ordered a hostage rescue mission that has failed. Scottish aid worker Linda Norgrove died when Special Forces tried to rescue her from the Taliban in Afghanistan.
David Cameron had also telephoned his Italian counterpart Mario Monti to tell him of the failed operation – but last night there was growing anger in Italy as it became clear that Rome was informed of the raid to free the hostages only once it had got underway.
Further details of the rescue bid were emerging last night, but it remained unknown whether Christopher McManus and Franco Lamolinara – a 48-year-old father of two – died before or during the operation.
There were reports the men may have been held in a house in Sokoto, a city in Nigeria’s north-west.
One witness said: “The security agencies tried to break into the house but there was resistance. The people inside the house were shooting at them and they returned fire.”
None of the 20 strong British rescue force was injured and Nigerian president Goodluck Jonathan said all the terrorists had been arrested.
The rescue was triggered when – after months of searching – the SBS found the heavily protected location where the men were being held.
PM David Cameron said authorities had decided to go ahead with the rescue after receiving “credible information about [the men’s] location”.
“A window of opportunity arose to secure their release. We also had reason to believe that their lives were under imminent and growing danger,” David Cameron insisted.
David Cameron said it was “with great regret’ that he had to announce Chris McManus, from Oldham, and Franco Lamolinara had lost their lives in the subsequent operation.
“I am very sorry that this ended so tragically,” David Cameron stressed, adding: “Terrorism and appalling crimes such as these are a scourge on our world. No one should be in any doubt about our determination to fight and to defeat them.”
Christopher McManus, a contract worker for an Italian construction company, was kidnapped by gunmen in May last year after they stormed his apartment in Birnin-Kebbi in the north-west of Nigeria.
Franco Lamolinara, a 48-year-old father of two of Gattinara near Turin, was also taken. A German colleague escaped by scaling a wall despite being shot and injured.
Last night Chris McManus’s parents, two brothers and sister issued a statement thanking all involved in the attempted rescue.
The statement said: “We are of course devastated by the news of Chris’s death, which we received earlier today.
“During this ordeal we have relied heavily on the support of our family and friends which has never waned and has enabled us to get through the most difficult of times.
“We are also aware of the many people who were working to try and have Chris returned to our family, and his girlfriend. We would like to thank all of them for their efforts.”
The family said they were confident “everything that could be done was being done’ during their ten-month ordeal and sent their condolences to relatives of the other dead hostage”.
Chris McManus and Franco Lamolinara had been working on building a bank in the city, the capital of the lawless Kebbi province.
In August a Nigerian group calling itself “Al Qaeda in the land beyond the Sahel” claimed responsibility for the kidnap and released the video showing Chris McManus, in a Manchester United shirt, with three men armed with Kalashnikov rifles and a machete.
Chris McManus pleaded for the British Government to answer the demands of the group to save his life. One of the kidnappers then said the British Government had failed to answer its demands and it was given two weeks to “take the correct decision”.
Yesterday, security officials said they believed the kidnappers were from a splinter group of the Islamist militant group Boko Haram, which has links to Al Qaeda.
Sources said British Ministry of Defence officials approached David Cameron on Wednesday evening and made it clear they believed there was a “time-limited opportunity” to mount an attempt to free the men.
David Cameron took the decision to go ahead and then followed the operation “in real time” yesterday morning. A meeting of the Government’s emergency committee Cobra was convened, but word came back that the two men had been killed by their captors.
The Italian prime minister’s office said that it had been “constantly in touch with British authorities but that the operation had got underway with the Nigerians and British forces with Italy informed once it had begun”.
Former Italian Prime Minister Massimo D’Alema said: “I want full light to be shed on why Italy was only informed once the operation had started.”
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