Scan Confirms Legend of the Titanic's Last Hours

The legend goes that Titanic's stokers were shoveling coal into boilers to keep the lights on even as the ship sank. Now, analysis of a digital scan of the shipwreck on the ocean floor some 350 miles off the coast of Newfoundland appears to confirm the story as truth, per the BBC. Underwater robots took 715,000 images of the wreck from every possible angle to create the most detailed 3D scan of the wreckage yet, revealed in 2023. The scan, studied for a new National Geographic documentary Titanic: The Digital Resurrection, offers a new view of a boiler room at the rear of the bow, exposed when the ship split in two, and shows some boilers are concave. According to the BBC, this suggests they were still in operation when they hit the icy ocean.

For Titanic analyst Parks Stephenson, the scan is "like a crime scene." "You need to see what the evidence is, in the context of where it is" to understand what happened, he tells the BBC. On the deck of the stern, a valve in the open position also suggests steam was flowing into the electricity generating system. All of the ship's engineers, led by Joseph Bell, died in the disaster, but they were heroes, says Stephenson. In keeping the power on, "they held the chaos at bay as long as possible" and gave "the crew time to launch the lifeboats safely with some light instead of in absolute darkness."

Elsewhere, the scan reveals a broken porthole, which may have been smashed as the ship scraped past the iceberg that would bring about its doom. As with the boiler room stories, this evidence tallies with eyewitness reports indicating ice burst through cabin portholes during the collision, per the BBC. A new computer simulation of the damage caused by the iceberg—based on the 3D model, blueprints, and other information—indicates a "glancing blow" from the iceberg lasting 6.3 seconds left a long line of small punctures, about the size of a piece of paper, along a narrow section of the hull, now buried in sediment, per the BBC and ABC News. The damage is thought to have flooded six of the Titanic's 16 major watertight compartments. The ship was only designed to withstanding flooding in four. (More Titanic stories.)