London, Europe Brief News – A new video of one of the earliest visits to the Titanic deep-sea wreckage was released this week to the public on YouTube.
The footage also offered 80 minutes of uncut clips showing the ship as explorers would have seen it in 1986.
The RMS Titanic was on its maiden voyage from Southhampton in the United Kingdom on April 15, 1912, when it struck an iceberg on the way to New York City in the United States. The collision would be fatal.
The largest ocean liner of its time, the Titanic was supposed to be a state-of-the-art ship, with watertight compartments that could be sealed if disaster struck. This and other innovations led its parent company to insist the ship “will not go down”, even after its employees lost contact with the damaged ocean liner.
Of the more than 2,200 people who boarded the Titanic, an estimated 1,500 died as the ship sank into the Atlantic Ocean. Wednesday’s footage came in conjunction with the 25th anniversary re-release of the 1997 film Titanic, which dramatised the final moments of those on board.
The movie won 11 Academy Awards, including for best picture, and helped propel actors Kate Winslet and Leonardo DiCaprio to stardom.
For decades, the remnants of the Titanic remained lost, hidden below fathoms of icy ocean water. But on September 1, 1985, a team from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) and the French National Institute of Oceanography discovered the ship’s wreckage off the coast of Newfoundland in Canada.
