[URL]http://io9.com/5894999/first-high+resolution-images-of-the-wreck-of-the-titanic/gallery/[/URL]
[quote]
The wreck sleeps in darkness, a puzzlement of corroded steel strewn across a thousand acres of the North Atlantic seabed. Fungi feed on it. Weird colorless life-forms, unfazed by the crushing pressure, prowl its jagged ramparts. From time to time, beginning with the discovery of the wreck in 1985 by Explorer-in-Residence Robert Ballard and Jean-Louis Michel, a robot or a manned submersible has swept over Titanic's gloomy facets, pinged a sonar beam in its direction, taken some images-and left.
In recent years explorers like James Cameron and Paul-Henry Nargeolet have brought back increasingly vivid pictures of the wreck. Yet we've mainly glimpsed the site as though through a keyhole, our view limited by the dreck suspended in the water and the ambit of a submersible's lights. Never have we been able to grasp the relationships between all the disparate pieces of wreckage. Never have we taken the full measure of what's down there.
Until now. In a tricked-out trailer on a back lot of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI), William Lange stands over a blown-up sonar survey map of the Titanic site-a meticulously stitched-together mosaic that has taken months to construct. At first look the ghostly image resembles the surface of the moon, with innumerable striations in the seabed, as well as craters caused by boulders dropped over millennia from melting icebergs.
On closer inspection, though, the site appears to be littered with man-made detritus-a Jackson Pollock-like scattering of lines and spheres, scraps and shards. Lange turns to his computer and points to a portion of the map that has been brought to life by layering optical data onto the sonar image. He zooms in, and in, and in again. Now we can see the Titanic's bow in gritty clarity, a gaping black hole where its forward funnel once sprouted, an ejected hatch cover resting in the mud a few hundred feet to the north. The image is rich in detail: In one frame we can even make out a white crab clawing at a railing.
Here, in the sweep of a computer mouse, is the entire wreck of the Titanic-every bollard, every davit, every boiler. What was once a largely indecipherable mess has become a high-resolution crash scene photograph, with clear patterns emerging from the murk. "Now we know where everything is," Lange says. "After a hundred years, the lights are finally on."
[/quote]
[IMG]http://img.gawkerassets.com/img/17h221xxedlu3jpg/xlarge.jpg[/IMG]
Bigger and better pictures in the link.
Apparently this is all assembled from surveying pictures taken during a 2010 expedition. This is as close as you'll ever get to draining the ocean and seeing the wreck in daylight. The bacteria devour a little more of the wreck every year, so it's essential to create and preserve a photographic record before the entire thing collapses into a pile of rust sometime during our lifetimes.
You can see how tremendously violent the sinking was to the ship, the stern section imploded as it corkscrewed 12,000 feet down and slammed into the bottom, blasting tons of steel all over the surrounding seafloor. The bow went in at an angle and hit hard enough to bury it to the level of the anchors, and as the rest of the bow settled it broke the back of the ship in multiple places and the sheared-off decks pancaked on top of each other. Small pictures and bits of video don't have the impact of seeing it all at once, where you can really comprehend what the ship went through.
I wish we had images like this for other significant wrecks, like the [i]Yamoto[/i], [i]Bismark[/i], [i]Brittanic[/i], [i]Lusitania[/i], or [i]Andrea Doria[/i]. With ROV technology it should be cheaper than ever before to put together this kind of visual and historic record while the wrecks are still intact.
Next time link directly from the source so I and everyone else doesn't have to deal with Gawker's fucking asswipe of a website layout.
[url]http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2012/04/titanic/sides-text[/url]
You're late
This is from last December
[url]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Wars:_The_Old_Republic[/url]
Creepy.
National Geographic site has the full article and a greater selection of pictures, but Gawker lets you view them in higher resolution. I would link to NatGeo if they let me view a properly monitor-sized image.
I wish the originals were available to download somewhere...
[editline]20th March 2012[/editline]
[QUOTE=koeniginator;35225149]You're late
This is from last December
[url]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Wars:_The_Old_Republic[/url][/QUOTE]
what
[QUOTE=Used Car Salesman;35225186]what[/QUOTE]
meme that compares SWTOR to the titanic.
[media]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y4-X0WUNN_g[/media]
The pics just show how accurate Ken Marschall's paintings really are
[img]http://www.maritimequest.com/liners/titanic/photos/art/15_titanic.jpg[/img]
the man is a wizard
[QUOTE=FreakySoup;35225317]The pics just show how accurate Ken Marschall's paintings really are
[/QUOTE]
I was just looking at his website a few minutes ago. Ken Marschall has a gift for taking lots of small, keyhole-like looks at a wreck and rendering it into a complete view. I know he's worked on assembling composites like this before, I wonder if he had a hand in creating these as well.
[url]http://www.kenmarschall.com/[/url]
Too bad he doesn't have any of his non-Titanic work posted on the site, I know he's done similar paintings of [i]Brittanic[/i] and the [i]Andrea Doria[/i].
