Titanic: The Final Word with James Cameron Page #7

---

about the effects of hydraulic outburst.

When these big masses come down

and stop suddenly on the bottom,

build up these intense,

internal hydraulic pressures,

and how that can eject big, flat areas,

like decks, and like side shell plating

and so on, and that probably launched

the cranes off the ship at that point.

Okay, that makes sense.

The placement of the cranes

and the damage to the poop deck

help explain how the stern got obliterated.

Now let's turn to what we don't know,

the three outliers.

We haven't yet explained them.

Until we do, we won't know exactly

what happened to the ship

as she vanished beneath the surface

100 years ago.

One of the more unique challenges

to studying the wreck

is trying to see past what 100 years

of sitting at the bottom of the ocean

has done to the steel.

Titanic is not rusting in the way

that we would think of rusting.

It's actually being eaten by bacteria.

And the bodies of these bacteria form

these amazing structures called rusticles.

They look like stalactites,

and they are actually formed

in kind of a similar way

in that stalactites are a deposition

of minerals created by gravity.

This is actually the deposition

of dead bacteria

that have iron inside their bodies

that they have absorbed from the ship,

and they just kind of form these structures

that are actually organic.

I think the rusticles are now

part of this amazing monument

at the bottom of the ocean.

- Tell him to move ahead slowly.

- MAN:
Move ahead slow.

CAMERON". Part of what's fascinating for me

is that it's this onion skin process.

You have to peel away

the layers of the damage,

working in reverse order from what

you're seeing right now in the present.

Now we're looking at Titanic

from 100 years later,

so you've got the deterioration

at the sea floor,

on top of the bottom impact,

on top of the descent,

and then the breakup at the surface.

Once we apply our forensic process,

Titanic's remains in the debris field

begin to tell the story

of what happened on that night,

April 14, 1912.

So far, our theory of how the wreck

traveled through the water column

and what happened at impact

fits the evidence,

except for three outliers.

How did these two pieces of double bottom

and a pile of deckhouse debris

from beneath the third funnel

end up far from the rest of the wreck?

Well, the two double bottom sections

are wing-shaped, so...

- These are wings.

- Yeah.

- These are 747 wings.

- Yeah.

CAMERON:
They both happen to land

within a fairly narrow cone of each other,

so it's likely

they were attached to each other

and separated at some point

in the water column,

and then fell separately.

I agree. They had a weakened area that

kept them together for a certain period.

When you're sitting at a table of experts,

and you start whittling away

at what's real and what's not real,

and you end up with real mysteries

that are solvable...

You know, the answers are there.

The clues are at the bottom of the ocean.

So, they're coming down through the water

-kind of like that.

- Right.

Right? And then finally it just exercises it

so much, it breaks apart,

-whatever that last connection was.

- Right.

CAMERON:
it would look

something like this.

The pieces of double bottom keel

begin life together,

and on the journey down, exercised apart,

planing away like an aircraft wing

to where we find them today

out in the debris field.

- All right. So, that accounts for that.

- STEPHENSON:
Right.

- That's not a planing shape.

-It's not.

- This is just a big pile of junk.

-It's a big, ugly pile of junk.

Big, dirty pile of junk

that would not have any strong tendency

to plane in any one direction.

And it's a big, lumpy shape.

It's just a pile of crap

on the ocean floor right now.

It has no aerodynamic qualities,

has the same aerodynamic qualities

as one of the boilers.

It's even bigger and larger

and heavier than the boilers,

yet, it ended up way far out there.

So, how did it get way over there?

(STAMMERING)

I think one of the big problems we have

is that we're thinking way over there,

when really, detaching from this point,

it's way over there.

Okay. No, no. I got it.

- We're not getting the vertical scale.

- No, no. Understood.

Right. So if something detaches here

and frisbees off, it's only going that far.

STEPHENSON". Jim threw out

a couple of quick ideas about it.

Being attached to the stern,

and the stern spiraling down,

and maybe it flung it off over there.

But the problem with that is,

there was a chunk of the ship

between that chunk and the stern,

and that didn't get thrown out there.

We don't have very good imagery of it.

We're going to need better imagery of it

to try and understand it more,

and see if there's clues in there

that will help us understand

why it ended up out there so far.

CAMERON:
Although there are

still mysteries,

we've learned enough

to rewind the clock farther

on the night of April 14, 1912,

to the moment Titanic lost her fight

to stay afloat and broke in two.

Let's take a look at the results of

a two-and-a-half year study

by naval architects

to see if we can pinpoint

where Titanic split and exactly how.

We've peeled away the layers

to reconstruct the story of the forces

that hammered Titanic

as she plummeted and hit bottom.

Now, it's time to look at

the breakup at the surface.

How did an unsinkable ship,

the world's greatest technological marvel

at the time, break in two?

If the wreck site is a crime scene,

the breakup was her last breath.

In the days that followed the disaster,

the US Senate hearing

and the British Board of Trade inquiry

recorded contradictory

eyewitness testimony about the breakup.

Some saw her break in two.

Others swore she went down whole.

The British Board of Trade

concluded that Titanic sank intact.

Not until 1985,

when explorer Bob Ballard's co-expedition

with the French found the wreck,

did we have proof, once and for all,

that Titanic broke apart.

Dr. Ballard will take questions now,

if you have any.

MAN:
How do you account for the fact that

the bow and the stern

are at opposite ends of the debris field?

Well, we found the boilers there,

major pieces of the stern,

and that's separated by 800 meters.

I don't know.

And again, I'm sure that 30%, if not more,

of what I'm selling you right now

I will try to eat

in a few weeks, when I finally get a chance

to look at my data.

SAUDER". I'm kind of embarrassed

that somebody in the '70s or the '80s

didn't put forward the breakup.

- When you read the many accounts...

-it's all there.

-...it says, like...

- MARSCHALL:
It's all spelled out.

...vast amounts of cork were found.

Well, that's what they used

to insulate the uptakes.

You know, the Pan's Wood,

it's a piece of wood from the lounges.

As a matter of fact, you use it in the movie.

I think Rose is on it,

and Leo says, "Goodbye."

Well, if the lounge is gone,

Rate this script:0.0 / 0 votes