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The wreck of RMS Titanic has lost a significant portion of its bow railing, according to the company with exclusive salvage rights to the shipwreck, which conducted its most recent surveys of the iconic vessel in July.
The bow railing fell sometime between 2022 and this summer, according to a company release, as the wreck slowly succumbs to the immense pressure some 12,500 feet (3,810 meters) beneath the surface of the Atlantic Ocean.
The bow with a collapsed section. Image: Courtesy RMS Titanic, Inc. Titanic was lost in the early hours of April 15, 1912, after striking an iceberg several hundred miles southeast of Newfoundland. The disaster resulted in more than 1,500 deaths; many of those who did not drown suffered cardiac arrests shortly after being exposed to the frigid water temperatures.
When the ship sank, it broke into two halves that landed mostly intact on the Atlantic seafloor. The shipwreck was discovered in 1985, and in 1994 a U.S. federal court granted salvage rights to RMS Titanic, Inc., which occasionally recovers artifacts from the site of the Titanic and exhaustively images the wreck.
In its recent survey, the team rediscovered Diana of Versailles, a bronze statue that sat in Titanic‘s first class lounge. The statue was displaced during the disaster and landed in the wreck’s large debris field, where it was discovered in a 1986 expedition. But the statue’s location was lost, and the team only rediscovered it (and photographed the statue) during its recent expedition.
The bronze statue known as Diana of Versailles on the Atlantic seabed. Photo: Courtesy RMS Titanic, Inc. Though some of the bow railing remains, the release stated that a “significant section” fell “from the port side prow,” which “irrevocably changes one of Titanic‘s most recognized and symbolic visuals.” Indeed, the bow railing is the site of some of the 1997 film’s most uplifting scenes, charged with the sobering familiarity regarding the ship’s fate.
3D scans of the wreck made in 2023 compiled more than 700,000 images to create a photorealistic model of the wreck. The recent survey team did several better, capturing more than two million high-resolution images and videos, as well as mapping the wreck and its debris field with LiDAR, sonar, and a hyper magnetometer, which collects magnetic data.
The Titanic’s port railing on the Atlantic seabed. Image: RMS Titanic, Inc. Titanic‘s deterioration is inevitable; the wreck is being eaten by undersea microbes and is at the mercy of the extreme pressure at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean.
But with that inevitable process comes opportunity: as stated on RMS Titanic, Inc.’s website, sites of collapses on the wreck could provide opportunities to get “unobstructed access to the interior of the ship.” One of the most surreal (and indeed, serene) images of the shipwreck is the bathtub belonging to Titanic‘s captain, Edward Smith, which survived the trip to the bottom of the ocean. More views of Titanic‘s interior spaces may shed similarly human lights on the wreck, which remains a resting place for the many hundreds who lost their lives 112 years ago.
