Rare images released of Titanic wreck: ‘pretty spooky’ | Abroad

Employees of the American research institute Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) took the images at a depth of about three kilometers, just a few months after researchers discovered the wreck in 1985.

Several documentaries on the Titanic have since shown some of that original footage, but a longer video of 80 minutes of raw footage was released on YouTube for the first time on Wednesday.

The Titanic hit an iceberg on April 15, 1912 during its maiden voyage from Southampton, England, to New York. The ship, considered virtually unsinkable, was the largest ocean liner in operation at the time. More than 1,500 people died in the shipwreck.

It was not until September 1, 1985 that the broken ship was discovered by a team from WHOI and the French National Institute of Oceanography off the coast of the Canadian province of Newfoundland.

During 11 diving excursions in July 1986, images were taken from a manned submarine and a small, remote-controlled craft that could maneuver through confined spaces.

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Robert Ballard was one of the oceanographers aboard the manned submarine ‘Alvin’. “The first thing I saw emerging from the darkness at 10 meters was a wall, a gigantic wall of steel that rose more than 30 meters above us,” he said during an interview from the US state of Connecticut on Wednesday. “I never looked down at the Titanic. I looked up at the Titanic. Nothing was small,” he said.

As the Alvin rose to the surface again, Ballard was shown the ship’s portholes. “It was like people were looking back at us. It was pretty spooky,” he recalls. There was no trace of human bodies, but he did see shoes, including a pair of shoes that appeared to belong to a mother and a baby. They looked like tombstones marking the place where some of the dead crewmen were laid to rest. “After the Titanic sank, those who didn’t have life jackets died of hypothermia and their bodies sank,” Ballard said.

The unveiling of the images is accompanied by the new release of Titanicmarking the film’s 25th anniversary, which won 11 Oscars, including Best Picture.

“More than a century after the loss of the Titanic, the human stories that the great ship embodied continue to resonate,” director James Cameron said in a statement. “With the release of these images, WHOI is helping to tell an important part of a story that spans generations and goes around the world.”