Nat Geo Reveals Expansive Digital Rebuild of Titanic Wreckage (Video)

The Titanic is the ship that won’t go away, even while resting at the bottom of the North Atlantic Ocean.

April 14 marks the 113th anniversary of the R.M.S. Titanic’s sinking, and we’re now 28 years removed from the blockbuster movie. Step aside, Jim Cameron, Nat Geo’s now got that Avatar tech.

National Geographic and Atlantic Productions’ Titanic: The Digital Resurrection released an impressive trailer on Tuesday, April 8. The 90-minute documentary from filmmaker Anthony Geffen uses “exclusive access to cutting-edge underwater scanning technology, including 715,000 digitally captured images,” per Nat Geo. All of that comes together to create “a full-scale, 1:1 digital twin, accurate down to the rivet.”

The technology is supplied by deep-sea mapping and engineering company Magellan. How deep of a sea-mapping company are they? The Titanic resides 12,500 feet below the surface. For some context, that Titan submersible voyaging to the wreckage imploded at a depth of more than 10,000 feet.

A pair of ROVs — Remotely Operated Vehicles — named “Romeo” and “Juliet” (someone is way into mid-90s Leo DiCaprio) gathered 16 terabytes of data over three weeks. It took two years to analyze.

For the documentary film, Titanic analyst Parks Stephenson, Metallurgist Jennifer Hooper and Master Mariner Captain Chris Hearn “dissect the wreckage up close on a full-scale colossal LED volume stage, walking around the ship in its final resting place,” the documentary’s logline reads. “From the boiler room where engineers worked valiantly to keep the lights on until the bitter end to the first-class cabins where the ship ripped in two, the scan brings them face-to-face with where the tragedy unfolded.”

One of the experts’ notable findings was an open steam valve, which could validate eyewitness accounts that the ship’s engineers remained at their posts in the boiler room for more than two hours after impact, keeping the electricity on and allowing wireless distress signals to be sent. So that’s pretty badass.

The hull fragments also informed the trio that the Titanic did not split cleanly in two — it was “violently torn apart,” they explained, “ripping through first-class cabins where prominent passengers like J.J. Astor and Benjamin Guggenheim may have sought refuge as the ship went down.”

Watch the documentary’s trailer here:

And oh yeah, there is one more thing: the case of Titanic First Officer William Murdoch. Oh man, that guy. But the experts here believe that the Magellan scans have found evidence “exonerating First Officer Murdoch,” who has long been labeled a coward accused of abandoning his post in one of those classic women, children and first officer life boats.

It was “the position of a lifeboat davit” that rewrites his history, suggesting that Murdoch’s crew “was preparing a launch moments before the starboard side was engulfed, corroborating Second Officer Charles Lightoller’s testimony that Murdoch was swept away by the sea.”

So, ah, sorry about all of that, literal generations of Murdochs. Watch that clip below.

Titanic: The Digital Resurrection is produced by Atlantic Productions for National Geographic. For Atlantic, Anthony Geffen produces, Lina Zilinskaite is the senior producer and Fergus Colville is the director. Simon Raikes and Chad Cohen serve as executive producers for National Geographic.

The documentary premieres Friday, April 11 at 9/8c on National Geographic channel and streams the following day on Disney+ and Hulu.