Titanic: The Final Word with James Cameron Page #2

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Titanic would be able to stay afloat

if any two compartments

or the first four became flooded.

According to her builders,

even in the worst possible accident at sea,

Titanic was virtually unsinkable.

-Iceberg, right ahead!

-Thank you.

CAMERON:
But we know

that on April 14, 1912,

Titanic sideswiped an iceberg

and sank in two hours and 40 minutes.

Full astern!

- Hard over.

- MOODY:
Helm's hard over, sir.

Why ain't they turning?

- Is it hard over?!

- It is. Yes sir. Hard over.

(METAL SCREECHING)

CAMERON:
One hundred years later,

this is what's left of Titanic,

a tangled wreck on the ocean floor.

Thousands of broken pieces.

But from her rust-covered remains,

we may still be able to figure out

what happened in her last moments.

Well, it's very important to find out

where all the objects wound up.

And then you can

work backwards from that

to sort of reconstruct

how the processes got started.

You've got to

peel away the bottom impact,

and you got to understand

what happened in the water column,

you got to understand

what happened at the surface.

Then maybe you can work your way back

to what actually set off the sinking

in the first place.

It's like a murder-mystery case

where some piece of evidence is an outlier.

Everything fits perfectly,

but there's one outlying piece of evidence,

and it seems so trivial,

and yet it unwinds everything else.

It's a great forensic process to go through.

It's the same thing that they do

at an NTSB analysis of a crash site

for an airliner.

You know, "How did that engine

get way over there?

"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.

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