Over 100 years ago, Titanic, the revered and unsinkable ship,
struck an iceberg
and sank 3,800 metres into the depths of the Atlantic Ocean.
For decades, the world thought she was lost for ever.
I think Titanic was one of those great mysteries.
How could it just fall off the face of the Earth?
More than 1,500 souls died that fateful night,
their lives inextricably linked
to one of the most tragic maritime disasters in history.
On every dive I make to Titanic, I take a moment to remember
where I am and what happened here, and to be...
connected to it.
Since her disappearance,
Titanic has become the Holy Grail for deep-sea explorers,
who set out on a race to find her.
To be honest with you, none of us really, on the ship,
had any idea of how interested the world would be
that we had found Titanic.
But now, the latest Titanic expeditions
have uncovered a grave new threat.
There's more life on Titanic now than there was
when she was at the surface.
It's just not human life.
And for the very first time,
3D animations of the evolution of the wreck
reveal how she will disintegrate.
The roof of the deckhouse was intact
but in 2004 and in 2010,
these areas are just dissolving away.
Will the legendary ship disappear forever?
Over time, decay will be inevitable.
We have to recover artefacts.
If we are not doing that, everything will be lost.
The legendary Titanic has fascinated historians, scientists
and the public for decades.
Since her discovery in 1985,
the Titanic wreck has been analysed by experts
to determine the cause of her sinking.
While every expedition gets closer to revealing more clues
about the infamous ship, one major discovery is concerning experts -
the wreck is being engulfed by bacteria
that consume hundreds of kilograms of iron a day,
posing a serious risk to the site.
During the sinking,
the initial impact will have twisted and turned metal.
Those twistings and turnings have actually opened cracks
in the steel that have now made it
much more available to bio-deterioration.
Naturally forming bacteria in the environment
attach and start degrading the wreck.
Over time, decay will be inevitable,
and that collapse will trap objects inside the ship
that could be of some kind of historical value.
World-renowned Titanic experts are returning to the wreck site
for the ultimate expedition.
Their mission is critical...
Dive down 3,800 metres to help scientists tell how much longer
it will be before the superstructure disappears forever.
Financed by American deep-sea explorer
and submarine pilot Victor Vescovo,
this expedition will determine the current state of the wreck.
And for the first time ever,
3D-animated footage reveals Titanic's evolution,
from when she first set sail,
to her time underwater after sinking on April 15th 1912, up until today.
Battered by fluctuating currents and seawater,
the wreck's different stages of rapid degradation
in the extreme environment on the ocean floor
are shown in these animations -
a major concern for the world's leading Titanic explorers.
We bring together
the most pioneering oceanographers of our time,
not only to relive their captivating journeys of discovery
but to shed new light on the danger that the wreck now faces.
One such expert is Jean-Louis Michel,
a pioneer in underwater research,
who co-directed the French-American scientific teams
of the discovery mission to localise and find Titanic in 1985.
TRANSLATION:
And Paul-Henry Nargeolet,
a former French Navy diver who has led seven expeditions to the wreck.
He is considered the saviour of Titanic's relics.
We found some little boxes with jewellery.
It was a big emotion because, you know,
it's like if you are opening a treasure box.
And Patrick Lahey, technological innovator, submarine builder
and the last man to see the wreck in person.
It was a dream to one day dive the Titanic.
Obviously, it's a very alluring wreck.
It's one we've heard about for decades, if not more.
You know, a tremendous human tragedy.
So I definitely wanted to see it and I figured one day, I would.
And James Cameron, an explorer as well as an innovator
in underwater marine and movie technology.
There was this powerful, almost magnetic, attraction
to find out what's down there,
that great mystery of what's down there in the darkness.
Back in 1997,
with the global success of his blockbuster feature film Titanic,
James Cameron delivered the history of the legendary tragedy
to the public as never before.
Although renowned as a film-maker,
Cameron is also a recognised deep-sea explorer,
with historic accomplishments to his credit.
For him, Titanic was the perfect entry into his passions.
Titanic is enormous - that's why they call it Titanic.
Well, I think what happens is that Titanic, sort of,
is like a black hole. It sucks you in.
I'd studied the history of it a great deal.
I'd become a member of the Titanic community,
many of whom are interested in the events of the sinking and so on,
and I think Titanic was one of those great mysteries.
How could it just fall off the face of the Earth?
To understand the impact of the ocean liner's disappearance,
we must return to her origins, when Titanic was already a world wonder.
The construction of the Titanic begins in 1909 in Belfast, Ireland,
and takes over three years to complete.
Measuring 269 metres long
and 53 metres high to the top of the smokestacks,
Titanic weighed in at 46,000 tonnes
and cost $7.5 million, or the equivalent of $201 million today.
She was widely thought to be unsinkable.
The Titanic represented in 1912 the top of the top,
and it was the best ship ever built and the biggest one ever built.
The top of technology,
the top of luxury -
everything.
With a capacity of 2,435 passengers
and 892 crew,
the ship attracted voyagers from all economic backgrounds.
The passengers on board the Titanic was the high society,
the rich people, that were very well known.
They were the stars of this time.
There was no movie stars, stuff like that.
It was the rich people that were the stars.
And also the immigrants that wanted to come to the US
to have a better life, a new life.
The lower classes were relegated to the lower decks,
away from the freewheeling first-class passengers.
But, for the aristocratic adventurer, the Titanic was designed
to entertain and delight at every moment...
..with luxurious decks and quarters,
a heated swimming pool,
a gym, cigar lounges,
a photography room,
posh dining areas and even Turkish baths.
Everything had been thought of, and no comfort spared.
For the wealthy, the seven days spent sailing to reach the shores
of New York City would be a chance to live the dream.
But that dream would soon turn into a nightmare.
The Titanic tragedy takes place because in 1912,
the winter was very warm and a lot of icebergs were there,
and that's why it was possible for the Titanic,
who was running by far too fast, to hit one of the icebergs.
Somewhere off the coast of Newfoundland...
..April 14th 1912, 11.40pm.
Four days after setting sail,
Titanic, the largest ship in the ocean,
hits an iceberg on its starboard side.
It takes less than 60 seconds to seal Titanic's fate
and doom the thousands of lives on board.
Alerted by the crew, Captain Edward Smith orders the engines stopped.
An hour later, the ship's prow
has already sunk ten metres under the surface.
It's chaos on the ship's deck.
Alone in the telegraph room,
the Marconi operator sends one last SOS message.
"Position, 41 degrees, 46 minutes north,
"50 degrees, 14 minutes west.
"SOS, sinking ship.
On April 15th at 2.20am,
the RMS Titanic's lights flicker for the last time,
before she sinks into the freezing ocean.
In under three hours,
the Titanic vanishes from the surface of the sea.
Of the 2,230 lives aboard,
over 1,500 people,
a majority third-class passengers and crew, perish,
reaching their final destination, along with the ocean liner,
at the bottom of the sea.
On land, news of the disaster travels around the world.
The ocean liner Carpathia
rescues over 700 passengers and crew from where Titanic sank.
But hope for more survivors quickly fades,
and the ship disappears without trace.
Four days after the disaster,
a press release from Halifax dashes any last hope.
According to experts,
the wreck lies between Nova Scotia and Newfoundland - a massive area.
The article adds that the wreck is estimated to rest
at 3,600 metres under the sea.
Initially, in the first few months after the sinking,
people wanted to go out there.
But when they found out that it hadn't fallen on the Grand Banks
in a few hundred feet of water,
that it had fallen in 12,000 feet of water,
and no amount of money in the world at that time
could get you that deep.
So it became this very mysterious, enigmatic thing
that had gone into another world, where it was unreachable.
At the time of Titanic's disappearance,
no-one on Earth knew how or where she could be found.
But explorers continued to seek ways to probe the deep unknown,
limited only by the technology of the day.
And it was, in fact, early film-makers who drove
the evolution of this science,
as they began a quest to film under the sea.
It was the beginning of the movie and, of course,
you have people who were thinking, "Why don't we do that underwater?"
They were trying to build some boxes to put their camera inside and,
you know, even today you have to be very careful
when you are doing that and they have a lot of trouble.
In 1916, one particular experiment
became the trailblazer of underwater photographic technology.
The Williamson Brothers adapted a naval telescopic system,
originally meant to recover sunken vessels, for photography.
This technology is used with an underwater camera
to make their feature film 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea.
Years later, on August 15th 1934, a new world record is set
when the American engineers Beebe and Barton
descend in their cast-iron bathysphere
to 928 metres below the ocean's surface.
When William Beebe built his sphere,
of course he wanted to test it first with nobody inside.
And when the sphere came back to the deck
and they started to open it, it was full of water, with pressure,
and they were like a big, you know...
A big storm of water occurring on the deck.
But they fixed the problem and after,
they go inside and they went down deep.
And it was really the beginning of deep diving.
From here, the sphere set the standard for underwater vehicles,
paving the way for many giant leaps
in technology and manned submersibles.
Here in Sebastian, Florida,
one of the world's most innovative engineers
is responsible for taking submersible technology
to the next level.
His submarine is the most recent to have dived to the Titanic wreck,
in August 2019.
We made five dives to Titanic
and I had the privilege of making three of those dives.
Being able to physically see something with your own eyes,
experience it in real time - it's emotional.
It's powerful.
And it's memorable.
The first sub that we built that was capable of reaching Titanic
was the Limiting Factor.
Because the sphere alone isn't enough
to protect against the pressure exerted at 900 metres below,
when designing the Limiting Factor,
engineers turned to titanium,
a strong and lightweight material
that can withstand pressure at the ocean's deepest depths,
and syntactic foam for buoyancy,
to ensure a vehicle's ability to return to the surface.
Fellow oceanographer Paul-Henry Nargeolet
is a close friend and collaborator of Lahey's...
Welcome. Good to see you back.
..and travels the world in search of the latest innovations
for his future expeditions to Titanic.
The Limiting Factor is 12 tonnes, 11, 12 tonnes,
which is very light, you know, for going much deeper.
The good thing with LF, you can launch the LF from your ship,
recover a dive and back and forth, back and forth.
You can dive almost every day in very deep water.
That's a big progress in the technology.
As technology continued to progress,
numerous attempts to reach the wreck tried and failed.
And it wasn't until the 1980s,
and the development of highly advanced manned submersibles,
that crucial progress will be made.
The US and France possess the most innovative
underwater technologies in the world.
In 1985, they come together and the real race to find Titanic began.
The first international campaign,
a cooperation between the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution
and the Ifremer Institute,
is co-directed by the American Robert Ballard
and the Frenchman Jean-Louis Michel.
At the time, the French oceanographer is developing
a state-of-the-art sonar called Sar.
TRANSLATION:
Jean-Louis Michel intends to use his sonar device to locate the wreck.
Attached to a boat on the surface,
the Sar robot can explore up to a depth of over 6,000 metres.
Information collected by reflected sound waves
can then identify materials on the sea floor.
The American team uses a different technology, called the Argo,
which works with an optical scan.
With a frame made of steel tubes weighing about 1,800 kilograms,
the undersea sled has an array
of sophisticated video cameras and lighting.
The Argo camera system was sort of revolutionary in terms of
the oceanographic survey world.
It's one of the first times that scientists would have a live image
from a towed camera system on the seafloor.
The Americans and the French hope to uncover debris from the Titanic
by scanning as much of the seabed as possible.
But before sailing off, they must define a search area.
For three years,
Jean-Louis Michel and his team gather survivors' recounts,
pore over reports by investigative commissions
and check the logbooks of nearby ships,
looking for areas in the ships' position,
to carry out an efficient and scientific investigation.
TRANSLATION:
Jean-Louis Michel estimates that the speed of the Titanic
was between 21 and 22½ knots.
The location and speed of the rescue ship Carpathia is also recorded.
By using this information in coordination with Titanic's route,
the explorers hope to locate the whereabouts of the wreck site.
The search area is narrowed to a 20km by 20km zone,
measuring approximately 400 square metres.
Still, Jean-Louis Michel's calculations are an estimation.
Would it be enough?
The hunt begins,
with the French first to set sail aboard the ship Le Suroit.
For 32 days straight,
the crew takes turn around the clock to scan the ocean floor.
On August 7th, Le Suroit and its towed robot
have scoured over 80% of the defined area, 320 square kilometres.
But Sar provides disappointing information.
There is no shipwreck.
Could they be looking in the wrong place?
On August 25th, the American team headed by Robert Ballard
arrives on site to take up the search
and comb through the remaining 20%, an 80-square-kilometre zone.
Aboard the Knorr, Jean-Louis Michel joins the American engineers
and technicians, including Bill Lange.
Bob Ballard had an idea that we didn't need
to look for the hull of the ship,
but a ship as big as Titanic should have a lot of debris
associated with it on the seafloor.
That debris, in conjunction with the hull of the ship,
is a much bigger target.
The hull of the ship is maybe 900 feet long.
The debris trail could be a mile long.
That's 5,280 feet.
So it's a lot bigger target to go and look for small debris.
That's why we used the Argo to go and look for that debris trail.
And for days upon days, we got nothing but mud.
People would get excited if we saw fish or a rock.
At midnight on September 1st,
I was on the watch from 12 midnight to 4am.
About 45 minutes to an hour into that watch,
started seeing some objects on the seafloor
and knew that they were man-made.
The team watches anxiously for potential evidence
of the elusive Titanic wreck site.
And, finally, the wait is over.
As we went on, all of a sudden,
a boiler came into the field of view
and Jean-Louis Michel screamed, "Boiler!"
CHEERING AND LAUGHTER
Titanic, the infamous ship that sank to the ocean's depths in 1912,
has been found.
And although the French came very close to discovering it first,
it is the American team that finally solves this mystery.
To be honest with you, none of us really, on the ship, had any idea
of how interested the world would be that we had found Titanic.
73 years after her sinking, the wreck's stunning discovery
confirms the account of some survivors -
the liner did indeed break in two.
The stern and the bow are a massive 600 metres apart -
an area much too large for the Americans to explore
in its entirety.
Now the wreck has finally been discovered,
plans are put in place to return to the site for a closer look.
1986.
Only 11 months after the wreck's discovery,
oceanographer Robert Ballard, aboard the submarine Alvin,
returns to the ruins of the giant ocean liner.
This second expedition to the Titanic site
offers the opportunity to test a new robot, Jason Junior.
This is the first time
a manned submersible has deployed a robot at this depth.
Jason Junior could roam around the wreck filming in colour.
The images collected are stunning.
I was actually in my first week or so of filming Aliens in England,
and I wasn't paying attention to the news at all.
I think I probably heard it in the background somewhere
that they had found the Titanic wreck.
And then I think when I got back and I was finished with Aliens,
I was just watching TV - I think even with the sound down -
and I saw a picture of the Jason Junior ROV.
I don't even think I bothered to turn the sound up,
because I knew what it was.
I could understand exactly what it was, just by looking at it.
And so, you know, I was just fascinated by it.
During the first dive with Alvin,
Alvin came up upon the steel wall,
and Bob describes this as this, just, dark
steel barrier that saw no end.
So it really wasn't till later that we started seeing,
from the video from Alvin, those things hanging down everywhere.
And we had no idea what they were.
Nobody had really seen those before.
These structures that cling to the hull, resembling rusty icicles,
are aptly named "rusticles" by Robert Ballard.
It just looks like the ship has been dripped in wax,
just brown wax has been poured over it.
These rusticles are seen on the hull's surface.
Is this unidentified growth mere rust,
or could it be a greater threat to the Titanic?
Experts are puzzled.
But until more information can be collected,
the rusticles remain a mystery for the time being.
The priority of the early Titanic expeditions was preservation.
During his return expedition,
explorer Robert Ballard found himself overcome with emotion.
As he glides over the field of debris around the wreck,
Ballard discovers a multitude of small objects
and personal belongings scattered over the ocean floor...
..bringing home the magnitude of lives lost.
And all that's left of human signature are their shoes.
And all around the Titanic are pairs of shoes.
Mothers' shoes next to daughters' shoes,
men's shoes, crew members'.
These are the tombstones.
I wasn't expecting to be hit by it.
See, I went in there, you know, totally under control, so to speak.
And I was blown away.
It was a very moving experience that I did not expect to have.
A vast field of objects stretches out before Robert Ballard's eyes.
Hundreds of thousands of items are spread over less than 2km
between the ship's prow and stern.
The jumble of passengers' personal belongings,
mixed with giant pieces of machinery,
bear witness to the violence and tragedy of the wreck.
A portion of the debris field is nicknamed Hell's Kitchen,
due to the many cooking utensils strewn about.
Sections of the hull lie all around.
Deeply moved by this apocalyptic sight,
Robert Ballard vows to preserve the wreck as a shrine to the lives lost.
But, despite intense campaigns against bringing up artefacts
from the Titanic, two years after its discovery,
a French-American team sails off on a two month expedition.
Its goal - to salvage objects from the seafloor and enable
the world to learn even more about the Titanic and its passengers.
To carry out this deep-sea archaeological excavation, in 1987,
the French Nautile is chosen over the American Alvin.
As the Alvin belongs to the US Navy,
it is not authorised for private expeditions.
Today, the famous yellow submarine is still in operation
and remains at the cutting-edge of technology.
To date, Nautile has made a record 119 dives to the Titanic.
Nine of these were piloted by Jean-Paul Justiniano.
TRANSLATION:
In order to bring artefacts to the surface, the submarine
is equipped with various tools, including gripper arms.
A genuine Swiss-army knife of the deep,
the Nautile is capable of operating at over 6,000 metres under the sea.
The movement of the arms are basic.
They can be raised, lowered and angled
using various joysticks inside the sub.
Like a rocket ready to break away from Earth's gravity,
the submarine is hoisted out over the open sea.
The winch lets out several metres of cable
and the Nautile plunges into the big blue.
The exterior of the Nautile is inspected in the water.
At this point, any error could lead to a deadly chain of events.
Inside the sphere, the final checks - all ready.
Cramped in a mere half a cubic metre,
the three crew members make their descent in total darkness,
to save on battery power.
The Nautile takes 1 hour and 15 minutes
to reach the Titanic, at 3,800 metres below sea level,
at a speed close to one metre per second.
Before reaching the ocean floor, the submarine slows
and turns on its powerful search lights.
Over the course of 32 dives,
over 1,800 items were brought back up with Nautile's basket,
or with elevators capable of hauling heavy loads.
The first expedition ever to recover objects at this depth
is an achievement.
In the middle of the debris field, the expedition comes across
a curiously tidy arrangement of ceramic plates.
Items like these pose a dilemma for the team.
One by one, the fragile plates are gently captured by suction
and brought to the basket.
In total, Ifremer collected 5,800 items
as a contractor for the American company RMS Titanic, Inc,
the only entity authorised to bring up artefacts from the wreck.
And with the recovery of these precious relics, the Titanic
is intimately brought into the hearts and minds of the public.
Las Vegas.
The world's largest exhibition dedicated to the famous ship
brings together all of the iconic items.
In the early 1990s, the battle intensified
between those who wanted to rescue Titanic's artefacts
and those who saw the site as an inviolable sanctuary.
For Paul-Henry Nargeolet,
these recovery missions are essential
to preserving the history of the Titanic.
We have to recover artefacts,
we have to recover even pieces of the ship and preserve them
on the surface, and we can save them for the next future generation.
If we are not doing that, everything will be lost.
In the open air, artefacts deteriorate rapidly.
To ensure long-term conservation, delicate relics are treated
and cleaned by engineers and jewellers.
Items are immersed in chemical baths
and metallic pieces treated with electric current.
Certain items may need several years to be restored.
The recovery of Titanic's artefacts goes even further
when, in 1994, expedition leader Paul-Henry Nargeolet
discovers an enormous piece of Titanic's hull lying on
the ocean floor,
measuring 8 by 7 metres and weighing 18 tonnes.
Nicknamed the Big Piece, its recovery is a huge challenge,
costing millions of dollars.
We don't have a big crane or big ship for doing that,
and we were using what we call lift bags...
..full with diesel fuel of the ship.
Each bag has a capacity of 20 tonnes of fuel,
and each bag will give us, at the depth of the Titanic,
three tonnes of buoyancy.
Nothing like this had ever been achieved
by any archaeologist before.
One by one, the fuel bags filled with diesel are attached.
Step-by-step, we were releasing these bags.
So good was the system, we had the choice to decide when
to release the last weight and let the Big Piece come up by buoyancy.
The Ifremer team would need six days
to attach fuel bags to the Big Piece.
After 20 minutes of ascent, the piece of hull
once destined to live forever under the sea reappears in the light.
This monumental eight-by-seven-metre remnant
originated from the starboard side of Titanic.
Today, it is no less than a miracle
to see a piece of the Titanic preserved so well.
But other parts of the ship, still underwater, may not be as fortunate.
Since 1985, when the discovery of Titanic
revealed the rust-like formations covering her entire hull,
explorers wondered what these formations were
and what damage they were doing.
In a laboratory in Canada,
microbiologist Lori Johnston is amongst the world's leading experts
on Titanic's bacteria for the last 20 years.
Her analysis of the strange orange-coloured material
has revealed a surprising result.
The rusticles are alive.
There's more life on Titanic now
than there was when she was at the surface.
It's just not human life - it's biological and organic life.
So, you can see the stratification within the rusticle itself,
and it's almost like tree rings
as it builds up over time.
This here, you can see the glinting black
are tiny pieces of coal within there.
So, during the sinking, the coal that had come out from the boilers
had been in the water column,
so coaldust must have landed on here
and it's been incorporated into the rusticle itself.
In the early 20th century, no scientist imagined
that any form of life was possible down in the abyss.
But in her sinking,
the Titanic brought millions of bacteria down from above.
A find as surprising as if life had suddenly been discovered
on the surface of the moon.
These rusticles are colonies of bacteria.
They have their own... They create circulation inside.
They have gravity-fed flow, they feed nutrients from where
they're dissolving the ship down to the rest of the colony.
And they grow down until they... Sometimes, they get two metres long.
The rusticles have been known to cause deterioration
up to 100kg per day, of iron that it's removing from the ship itself.
And the wreck itself, Titanic, because it's made of steel,
is a very good food source at the bottom of the ocean.
For decades, rusticles have grafted onto the hull.
Between Titanic's sinking in 1912 and her discovery in 1985,
a few hundred kilos would have formed on the bow of the wreck.
3D modelling is used to show a time-lapse animation
of the degradation by bacteria of all parts of the Titanic.
This degradation is a threat to Titanic's existence...
..and another mystery for Titanic experts to unravel...
..including James Cameron, whose deep fascination with the wreck
inspired one of his greatest movie accomplishments to date.
This is not an exaggeration, to say that I actually made the film
because I wanted to go and dive to the Titanic wreck.
And then I had to make this movie.
"Ah, OK, all right, I'll make the movie."
And then that worked out well,
and so then I could afford to go some more. So, why not?
His interest in the world under the sea began at an early age.
That particular picture was taken when I was 14 years old.
I was fascinated by underwater things
and I had seen an underwater habitat at the Royal Ontario Museum.
And I did sketches of it and so on, and I got very excited.
I decided to build my own.
And I put my pet mouse in that and I lowered it on a rope
down to the bottom of a nearby river,
so it went down about 20 feet,
and the mouse was fine - he survived.
44 years later,
James Cameron is the first man in history to make a solo dive
into the Mariana Trench, the deepest place on Earth,
at 10,908 metres below sea level.
His objective has always been to explore the abyss.
An undisputed expert,
his passion is inseparably linked to his quest for the technology
and engineering needed to bring him closer to the Titanic.
I was fascinated by the idea of the very deep ocean.
I loved everything about the ocean and I wanted to see ROVs,
I wanted to see robotics, I wanted to see submersibles.
In 1991, a new expedition to dive down to the wreck
on the Russian Mir submersible is organised,
to capture rare images for a unique purpose -
an IMAX movie aimed at the general audience.
I said, "If they can do it on an IMAX budget,"
"which is a couple of million dollars,
"I can do it for a theatrical-feature budget
"that might be 10 or 20 times that."
I thought, "I'm going to Titanic."
Seeing a unique opportunity,
James Cameron decides to contact the person in charge of this expedition.
This person is no other than
the legendary Russian oceanographer Anatoly Sagalevich,
a man who shares the same passion for Titanic as the film-maker.
I remember the first dive on the Titanic.
All the time, my heart was just,
you know, jumped, you know.
Despite ten years passing since they last met,
Anatoly Sagalevich and James Cameron remain close friends.
Their numerous missions together
have bonded them like no other oceanographers.
I wish there were more scientists like you, Toly.
I wish everybody in the world could understand that to be
a scientist and an engineer and an explorer
doesn't mean that you live only in your head.
Anatoly also lives strongly in his emotions
and, to me, he's the ultimate human being.
He balances the mind and the heart.
Back in 1991, Russian crews used the Mir submersibles
for the IMAX expedition to Titanic.
These technologically advanced subs,
designed by Sagalevich himself,
gave James Cameron an idea.
Why I chose to work with the Mirs?
There are two.
There are two subs.
So the number of characters that you have in the story
is the number of vehicles that you have, minus one.
You have one vehicle - you have no character.
Right? You have two subs - sure, you can do images and you can have
the other sub stay out of frame and just light things up.
The second that sub enters frame, now you're telling a story.
And that's different. And we were there to tell a story.
Mir-1 just shot it, you know,
and Mir-2 made some lighting
or just made some kind of entertainment, like an actor.
We'd come up here and the lights would hit the ship.
You wouldn't see very much.
You'd just see this line, right there.
Then you come up and stop and then you wait for the other sub,
and the other side comes down behind you, maybe 20 minutes later.
So we sit and have a little tea,
and then the other sub arrives
and we begin our operation,
usually by flying up over the ship
and following along the ship.
It's Titanic, dude.
Check it out, huh?
For his film project, James Cameron aims to capture the Titanic
with state-of-the-art underwater cinematography and lighting.
Titanic is a very, very challenging photographic subject.
When you go into the deep ocean,
there is absolutely no ambient light there.
The visibility of the water might only be...
Let's call it 150 feet, maybe 200 feet at the most.
And the whole bow section is about twice that long.
You never even see the whole thing all at once.
And you have to just bombard it with light, because it's reddish-orange.
It's the colour of rust.
And the red colour doesn't travel through water very far.
So it's like the wreck just sucks your light,
so you have to dump enormous amounts of light on it.
So we put more lights on these poor Mir submersibles
than they'd ever had on them before.
We were bolting lights on and I kept saying,
"Let's add one more, let's add one more,"
and Anatoly's like, "Oh, my God!"
But we went down there and we lit the place up.
It takes James Cameron and Anatoly Sagalevich 12 dives
to scout and complete the shoot.
But the footage they captured
was unlike anything the world had ever seen.
So, they'd count portholes and they'd say,
"OK, we think we're at D35 right now."
I'd say, "shine your light in."
Meanwhile, I'm inside the ship with the ROV
and I'd see a light come in and I'd say,
"Oh, you're at the wrong window. Go to the next window."
And then once they got the right window... Remember all this? Yes.
But all the underwater technology
and lighting at Cameron's disposal was still not enough
to capture the necessary details for his Hollywood blockbuster.
This model was used in the movie Titanic because the bigger shots
that included two subs, um, had to be done with models.
We could only do shots with one sub
but they were supposed to be two subs in the story.
So, the bigger, wider shots were done using this model.
So this model had to match perfectly the real ship,
cos we were mixing shots of the real ship with shots of the model.
And I don't think the average person can tell the difference.
The answer is very simple.
If you see two subs in the shot, it's a model shot.
If you see one sub, it's the real thing.
Jim once asked me,
"Toly, what do you think? How many Oscars?"
I said to him, er...
"Ten, minimum."
He said, "No."
I said, "Yes, ten minimum."
The movie eventually took home 11 Oscars.
Although it cost $200 million to make, it grossed over 2 billion.
The film helped spread the legendary story of the Titanic worldwide,
across all generations.
However, the Canadian film-maker had no interest in stopping there,
and he decides to attempt to capture images
from places where no-one had gone before - the inside.
Ten years after their expedition to the wreck
for the blockbuster movie Titanic,
James Cameron and Anatoly Sagalevich team up again
for another 3,800-metre dive in 2005.
This time, they will attempt to go even further.
Back aboard the Mir,
James Cameron pilots an innovative robot vehicle,
equipped with cameras, to conduct an archaeological study
inside of the wreck.
He reveals and documents spaces in the Titanic
that no-one has ever seen before.
We used a very different methodology,
which was the fibre-optic that spools out.
The vehicle doesn't have to worry about fouling
and it doesn't have to worry about coming back out the same way.
I'm not sure if this is clear to people,
but we would fly wherever we wanted inside the ship -
upstairs, downstairs, down elevator shafts, through rooms and so on -
and leave behind thousands of feet of the fibre.
And then the vehicle comes back to the sub, we cut the fibre...
Recover the vehicle, cut the fibre and then we wind the fibre back
and it just, kind of, comes out through the ship
like a piece of string and comes back to us,
and then we dispose of it.
We're, um... We're just about to head down the stairwell now
and we're going to go down, actually, six decks,
and we're gonna to and get into the Turkish baths,
which we've never seen. Nobody's ever seen it.
Oh, my God! Copy that.
It's just... It's all here.
It's like time has just stopped.
It has.
It's hard to imagine where we are...
..how deep we are,
how remote we are from the human world.
And yet, we find this...
beautiful place.
When you're moving around inside the ship, you feel like you're either
in a cave or you're in, maybe, an earthen tunnel
where the roots of trees are coming down into the space you're in,
but it feels very organic.
And then, all of a sudden,
you'll see a cabinet with a mirror
or some artefact of civilisation surrealistically transported
into this biological, kind of,
grotto or cave-like environment.
It's very, very surreal.
Back at the James Cameron Studio, his model of the Titanic
has become a three-dimensional representation
of the bow of the wreck, as it was in 1997.
It is now possible to observe the damage.
You can see this collapse back here was caused when it initially hit.
Right in the first few seconds of the ship plunging,
the water pressure blew the mast back
and slammed it back into that position.
You can see where it's actually bent,
just like you'd bend a Coke can, you know?
It's just bent right there.
But then, the weight, the gravity,
has slowly brought it down and it finally just collapsed,
and it was already down when I was out there in 2005,
so that's ten years after my first expedition.
It was already down.
I think it's quite the way down now, collapsing in pieces.
At the bottom of the ocean, like a crumpled twig,
the mast is unrecognisable.
Originally, in 1912, it stood on the bow and carried a crow's nest.
It is from there that the lookout caught sight of the iceberg.
But now, attacked by corrosion, the mast has collapsed
and the crow's nest which was previously visible
has broken apart, crumbling under the rusticles.
And in 2010, a new expedition
names the bacteria Halomonas titanicae.
A branch of the bacteria family resistant to extreme conditions.
These iron-eating bacteria literally consume steel.
In the media, Halomonas titanicae is held responsible
as the main cause of the wreck's degradation.
One puny bacteria does not deteriorate the whole wreck.
You need that group, you need that community,
you need that consortia of bacteria and fungi moulds working together
to be able to cause the deterioration
and the rusticle structures on these wrecks.
It is the fate of every shipwreck to eventually disappear,
but Titanic's decomposition is unusually rapid.
In total, the scientific community
discovered 27 different strains of the bacteria,
estimated to be consuming between 200kg and 300kg of iron per day.
Based on this data, some experts predict
that the wreck will disappear in less than 20 years.
The race is on to get back to Titanic -
this time for an urgent assessment of the ship's deterioration.
If you're gonna manage something like this, a site this big,
you need to know its confines,
you need to know how big the site is.
The 2010 expedition maps out the entire wreck site
in an effort to gather data on her degradation.
Like archaeologists, the explorers make an inventory -
the most complete that they can.
The idea is to spot, identify and measure all the elements on site.
It is so far the largest ever scientific mission
dedicated to documenting the wreck.
We wanted to make certain that there wasn't any objects or artefacts
or anything from the wreck
that was quite a ways from the other concentration of items
at the wreck site.
And we're not looking at an optical image.
This isn't a camera.
We're looking at what's called acoustic reflectivity.
In the camera world, it would be the shininess of an object.
So, here you can see a sonar image of the bow of the Titanic.
This object up here is actually one of the hatch covers
that blew off the ship as it was landing.
On one side, the stern, completely destroyed.
On the other, the bow.
And in between, the vast field of debris.
For the first time, the site can be visualised in its entirety.
But Lange's work was far from done.
He prepares the biggest photo project ever undertaken.
And this time, it's not about discovery but about preservation.
We wanted a creative image of the wreck site
as if you were walking on the seafloor
and came up to this and there was no water there.
That's a big undertaking.
During the 2010 expedition, hundreds of thousands of images are taken.
Centimetre by centimetre, the wreck is photographed.
It takes Bill Lange and his team over two years to assemble
the pictures to create impressive photo mosaics.
The results display remarkable accuracy.
This crab clinging to the hull measures only 5cm.
Bill Lange has devoted his life to Titanic imaging.
In earlier expeditions, he succeeded at capturing her bow.
In 2010, by comparing his photos,
it is possible to see the evolution of the wreck.
What's also very evident is that the roof of the deckhouse
was intact in 1986 but in 2004 and in 2010,
we're seeing all these holes open up.
And this is where the metal roofs of these areas
are just dissolving away.
At this stage, the entire wreck is in danger,
at the mercy of an invisible enemy.
Scientists are researching how many elements -
including bacteria, oxygen corrosion and currents -
are causing irreversible damage to the steel colossus.
But nine long years will pass before anyone returns
to check in on the wreck.
OK, Tom, last check.
We're gonna just have tandem,
or maybe you can just secure your own hatch.
Roger that. Securing...
August 2019.
Patrick Lahey, Lori Johnston and Paul-Henry Nargeolet
set out on the first expedition to Titanic in nine years.
Doors are closed. We've got two swimmers in the water.
We can start pumping down.
Roger that. Turning pumps on now.
Their mission - determine the state of degradation of the wreck.
We toured the wreck.
You know, we got up very close to the shipwreck and we went
around it in detail, front and back, debris field and everything else.
These are the very last images taken of the legendary Titanic wreck.
For Patrick Lahey, as for all explorers of the wreck,
every visit to this site is an overwhelming combination
of amazement and emotion.
I was in awe of its physical size, because,
yeah, you see pictures of it,
you've seen films about it,
but when you drive up to it
and you're physically looking at it
and you see how enormous the wreck is,
that was the first thing that struck me.
It was impressive, because it was
the scene of such human suffering, a tremendous tragedy.
There's nothing there, obviously, and I don't believe in ghosts
but I do believe that human memory can overlay on reality.
You know? And I started to cry.
In that moment, I made myself a promise that
on every dive I make to Titanic,
I take a moment to remember where I am
and what happened here, and to be...
connected to it.
The 2019 images enable us to observe
that the front of the bow has evolved very little
since the last expedition in 2010.
Those present at the dive
report that the amount of rusticles has not increased.
Deterioration continues but it has not accelerated.
The experts agree unanimously,
the wreck will not disappear in the coming decades.
Still, there are areas of the Titanic that remain at great risk,
like the rear of the bow.
The degradation here is a warning
of how the future of the wreck could progress.
What you can see here - this is the outer hull
on the starboard side,
and this is the outer hull
on the port side.
This is called shell plating,
and this is pulled away from the internal structure of the ship.
So, the internal framework - the decks and bulkheads -
were attached to the shell plating.
But because of the impact of the bow section hitting the sea floor,
the shell plating has pulled away from the internal structure.
For the first time, exceptional 3D-animated footage provides
an insight into future phases of ongoing degradation of the Titanic.
A future where the two parts of the hull break open like a book,
where the stacked decks cave in
and eventually collapse like a house of cards.
But how long will it take
for Titanic to transform from wreck into sediment?
The degradation of Titanic, er,
will probably never stop.
You know, the Titanic, it's a...
It's an unbelievable story.
And I'd say for sure,
in almost 500 years,
we will still see something on the bottom.
And, of course, it will be diminishing in size
and volume throughout that time.
But, based on, you know,
knowing that what I saw was over 100 years old,
there's no way at all that in another ten years
that the wreck will be fully consumed. Not even close.
But will what's left on the bottom of the Atlantic still resemble
the massive luxury ocean liner that once held over 2,230 lives on board?
If you come back in 300 years, this will all be gone,
this will still be here, and this will still be here.
This may be sagged in, partially collapsed, some holes in it.
This will still be here.
Over 100 years after her sinking,
the Titanic's bow
still looms majestically,
as if time had stopped, as she waits
for the next round of expeditions.
Titanic remains a legend,
and continues to rouse
the passions of explorers and scientists around the world.
Advances in technology and the evolution of the wreck
will surely open up new avenues
to explore the ghost of the abyss even further.
As always, despite the challenges faced,
the impassioned Titanic explorers will race to preserve what they can,
before the ruins of the most famous of ships vanish for ever.
There are definitely reasons to go back.
I think we've seen some of the most beautiful things already,
but the Titanic always keeps secrets.
Subtitles by Red Bee Media