Titanic: The Final Word with James Cameron Page #2

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"How did that wind up two miles back?"

You know, you can't really

piece together what happened

until you can account for every single piece

and where it got there.

Six hundred and forty kilometers

off the coast of Newfoundland,

and more than three kilometers

beneath the surface of the North Atlantic,

lies Titanic.

The wreck site spans

1.5 kilometers of the sea floor,

and is anything but accessible.

It takes about two-and-a-half hours

to descend in a submersible.

Daylight doesn't reach this depth.

It's eternal darkness.

Here, we find the bow and stern section

600 meters apart.

We find the ship's boilers

clustered east of the stern.

Cargo cranes sheared from the deck.

Broken pieces of funnel.

Ground-up shell plating.

Sections of the ship's keel,

or double bottom.

Rudders and propellers

pinned in the sediment, intact.

An open shell door at D deck.

There are serving plates, tea cups, shoes,

countless personal artifacts.

These are all clues in the mystery.

What caused

this magnitude of destruction?

How can we begin to make sense of it?

So, it's good to wrap our heads around this.

So, now you start looking

at a debris field map.

So, now you start looking

at a debris field map.

STEPHENSON". It's part

of that crime scene recreation

of seeing everything on this macro level.

We can get down to individual images

of each individual piece,

but you need the context of it,

to keep that forest in sight.

You have to have

that map of the wreck site

to do any meaningful forensics.

CAMERON:
Titanic's bow and stern are torn

in two and lie apart,

like a crime scene where the body and head

are on opposite sides of the room.

You can see it. You can see it on the

debris field map here.

It's a very interesting thing.

Bow points north,

and it's partly dug into the sediment.

Its open end is ragged,

it's not a clean break.

At first glance,

it appears the farthest object north,

but there's the number one cargo hatch,

and that's 8O meters forward of the bow.

And the hatch bolts are all severed.

So, what did that?

And how did the bow break from the stern?

What did this?

The stern points south,

facing the opposite direction of the bow.

Looks like a bomb hit it.

To the east of the stern lie five boilers

from Boiler Room 1,

the midsection of the ship.

I think the location of these boilers

is our first lead.

If you just draw a circle

around those five boilers,

and you take the center of that circle,

I think that's where the ship

broke up at the surface.

Right.

CAMERON". Okay, these five boilers

help us to find the hypocenter,

the ground zero for the disaster.

The hypocenter directly underneath

where the breakup took place

on the bottom

would be where the heaviest

and most uniform objects

would be clustered.

Now, with it,

we can extrapolate the journey

taken by each part of the ship,

from the surface to

where we find them today, on the bottom.

And then you have a kind of fallout pattern,

downwind, if you will, or down current,

for very light objects like teacups

and light debris and coal.

The coal being spread the farthest,

'cause it's the least heavy in water.

We can account for many objects

on our debris field map,

and explain how they traveled

from the breakup at the surface

to end their life four kilometers

down at the bottom.

But not every part can be

so easily explained.

Something that just occurred to me

for the first time in all these years is...

If that happened way up there,

isn't it interesting that we've got...

These would be your poop deck cranes,

and they're this close to

their original location.

The stern cranes sort of grouped together

and lying adjacent to the stern

was a little mystery that we had to solve.

And in solving that mystery,

it would shed some light

on what actually happened to the stern

when it hit the bottom of the ocean.

Why were those cranes there?

Where did they come from?

Odd, isn't it?

Then the question is,

what held the cranes with all this,

as opposed to them just scattering?

I don't know. I'm inclined to think

these came apart at a higher altitude.

I think that it's just coincidence

that they happened to wind up...

- CAMERON:
Ooh...

- Coincidence? There is no coincidence.

There's no such thing as coincidence.

- I agree.

- No. (CHUCKLES)

There was a tendency

on the part of the group,

I think, to reject the idea of coincidence,

which, I think, is always good

in this kind of analysis.

Jim will let you disagree with him

as long as

you have a reasonable argument,

and your facts are all in a row,

and they're doing a chorus dance

behind you.

I'm gonna jump to the crazy part of this.

- Yeah.

- All right?

Which is these two double bottom sections

and this big chunk.

There are three pieces of the wreck

whose placement on the debris field map

don't make sense.

They're outliers.

They're enigmas because

they're strangely out to the east

of the hypocenter.

We know from a past expedition

that these two, out of the three,

are pieces of Titanic's double bottom.

We know these parts are

from the same section of keel

because their ragged ends align

like two pieces of a jigsaw puzzle.

How did these two chunks of keel

detach from the bottom of the ship,

and end up to the east of the hypocenter?

And what about the third outlier?

Now, I'm just trying to account

for something that I don't understand,

which is this thing.

- This is just a big pile of junk.

- STEPHENSON:
It's a big, ugly pile.

Big, dirty pile of junk.

Nobody'd ever seen it before.

It's way off to the east.

It's beyond these double bottom pieces.

Okay, so the mystery piece,

the enigma piece is this.

STEPHENSON:
Is this. Yes.

You know, about the upper

couple of decks of that.

It's even bigger and larger

and heavier than the boilers,

yet, it ended up way far out there.

CAMERON:
How did this chunk,

from beneath the third frontal deckhouse,

end up way out there?

All right. Well, why don't

we stick to what we think we know,

and fill in the rest of the picture?

To fill in the rest of the picture

and visualize Titanic's final moments,

we need to go underwater

and take a closer look at the damage.

I see the wreck.

I see it.

Mir ll, Mir ll, this is Mir I.

Depth is 3,353 meters.

I love this stuff.

Exploration.

Real, honest-to-God,

deep-ocean exploration.

To me,

it's an alternative to making movies,

which is as technically challenging,

as emotionally challenging,

and it's something that

I can use my skills as a filmmaker.

It's about creating the technology.

It's about the personal challenge of actually

going into this hostile environment,

doing things right, doing things safely,

and coming back with results.

Say goodbye to the surface world.

I've been a wreck diver

for many years at scuba depths.

I love shipwrecks. I love the romance

and the mystery of shipwrecks.

And the Titanic's the ultimate wreck.

It's the Everest of shipwrecks.

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