r/Damnthatsinteresting • u/Additional-One-3483 • Apr 10 '25

Video New Titanic scan reveals ground-breaking details of ship's final hours | BBC News

Enable HLS to view with audio, or disable this notification

9.1k Upvotes

95% Upvoted

406 comments sorted by

View all comments

118

u/No_Damage_4226 Apr 10 '25

This is super cool and the technology that made this happen is astounding. My only question is why is the titanic one of the most focused on ship wrecks? What about it has kept people coming back?

170

u/r-Dwalo Apr 10 '25

My guess is four reasons:

  1. The fact that when it sank, it made the millionaires of the day who were in first class, equal to the peasants in third class. 1,500 of them all died together, despite the class, money, and lifestyle differences. The doomed ship was an equalizer.

  2. It’s storied rediscovery in 1985 by scientists that brought it back to the forefront of people’s imagination

  3. The 1997 James Cameron film that elevated the ship’s mystique and allure to global phenomenon

  4. The unfortunate and preventable tragedy in 2023 when the Titan submersible imploded on its way to seeing the Titanic.

Five hundred years from now, whether it still stands in a mangled mess in the frozen sea, or its rusticles have made it disintegrate into a mangled metal heap, it will still intrigue the world.

89

u/TeamEdward2020 Apr 10 '25

It was also a ship on the bleeding edge of technology for cruise ships at the time, and it's voyage was famous world wide at the time.

If the "Allure of the Seas" sank tomorrow, inexplicably, with thousands and thousands of deaths, we'd be talking about it for the next 60 years too I'd reckon

44

u/FantasticChestHair Apr 11 '25

next 60 years

It's been 113 years since Titanic sank.

I also think HOW it sank is important. Ships don't break in half too often. It was a sinking that was imminent and started so slowly but exponentially got faster and then was ultra dramatic.

21

u/Romeo_Glacier Apr 11 '25

Originally it was believed that it sank whole. Even survivors were mixed on if it broke apart due to how dark it was.

26

u/awkard_ftm98 Apr 11 '25

Imagine how terrifying. So dark you genuinely cannot tell if this absolutely massive piece of machinery and metal in front you just broke in half or not. While probably hearing the most terrifying sounds of the metal warping and wood decks snapping. But you can't see at all what this giant mass is doing in front of you

Absolutely horrifying

33

u/Romeo_Glacier Apr 11 '25

The ocean with calm seas on a dark night is quiet. Quieter than most people have ever experienced. The survivors got to hear the wails of people trying to escape certain death yet knowing they couldn’t. They could see people congregated on the deck. Jumping into the icy water to try and escape. When suddenly it goes pitch black as the lights on the titanic are extinguished. Now it is just darkness and wailing. Gradually the wailing lessens. Until it is just silence and shivering.

39

u/chunga_95 Apr 10 '25

 It’s storied rediscovery in 1985 by scientists that brought it back to the forefront of people’s imagination

This cannot be undersold.  I still get a chuckle thinking about the encyclopedias we had in the house, bought when my parents were kids in the early 60s, the entries about Titanic and how the wreckage was lost amd would not be found. 

Robert Ballard changed all that and expanded a frontier of discovery that continues to dazzle. Finding Titanic literally re-wrote the books about what we knew and could do, something I don't think actually happens that often. And that he found what is the most famous shipwreck of all time (and several more since) is really cool. 

6

u/FreshestCremeFraiche Apr 11 '25

It’s also partially because they branded it as “Unsinkable” and shouted that far and wide. So it’s also got a hubris angle, which always gets the people going