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New Titanic Images

March 22, 2012 by · Comments Off on New Titanic Images 

New Titanic Images, As the 100th anniversary of the sinking of the RMS Titanic approaches, National Geographic has released incredible views of the “unsinkable” ship sitting on the seabed.

On April 10, 1912, the Titanic launched her maiden voyage to New York from Southampton, England. On April 14, the ship collided with an iceberg and sank in the early hours of the following morning. According to the Smithsonian Institution, the Titanic’s final resting place is 12,500 feet deep.

See the stunning, never-before-seen images from the April 2012 edition of National Geographic magazine in the slideshow below. From Hampton Sides’ report:

The wreck sleeps in darkness, a puzzlement of corroded steel strewn across a thousand acres of the North Atlantic seabed. Fungi feed on it. Weird colorless life-forms, unfazed by the crushing pressure, prowl its jagged ramparts.

From time to time, beginning with the discovery of the wreck in 1985 by Explorer-in-Residence Robert Ballard and Jean-Louis Michel, a robot or a manned submersible has swept over Titanic’s gloomy facets, pinged a sonar beam in its direction, taken some images-and left.
In recent years explorers like James Cameron and Paul-Henry Nargeolet have brought back increasingly vivid pictures of the wreck. Yet we’ve mainly glimpsed the site as though through a keyhole, our view limited by the dreck suspended in the water and the ambit of a submersible’s lights.

Never have we been able to grasp the relationships between all the disparate pieces of wreckage. Never have we taken the full measure of what’s down there.

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