Scientists to create 3-D map of Titanic site

Esse, meus amigos, é o futuro da Arqueologia.

A team of top scientists, launching what is billed as the most ambitious and advanced survey of the Titanic, sets out next week to map in photographic detail the entire wreck site, and reconstruct in electronic form the ruins scattered on the seabed.

By melding photographs, high-definition video and computer imaging, scientists — including experts at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute — plan to create a three-dimensional computer model that will allow scientists and members of the public to “swim’’ through the wreckage online, as though they were at the site more than 2 miles below the ocean surface.

“We can raise the ship virtually,’’ said James Delgado, the expedition’s principal investigator and president of the Institute of Nautical Archaeology. “The data you can capture is incredible.’’

Scientific research on this scale, Delgado and others said, has never been attempted at these depths, where the pressure is more than 400 times that on earth’s surface, and the temperature never moves far from 39 degrees. There is no sunlight and little life.

Since the wreckage was discovered in 1985, expeditions have focused on recovering relics from the world-famous shipwreck and capturing footage of its sundered bow and stern.

The upcoming 20-day voyage, scheduled to set forth from Newfoundland Sunday, is far more ambitious, a groundbreaking attempt to probe nearly every aspect of the site, from the giant ship’s iconic bow to the colonies of microbes eating away at its iron hull. The mission will also catalog the countless artifacts strewn across the ocean floor.

Using the latest sonar and computer-imaging technologies, researchers will be able to record the site with new detail, clarity, and accuracy. They hope the pioneering effort will provide a blueprint for future deep-water exploration.

“We’ve never had the ability to map with such precision,’’ said David Gallo, a leader of the expedition from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution who estimates that as much as 40 percent of the vast site has never been surveyed. “We’re going to treat it like an archeological dig, and that’s never been done before at these depths.’’

The mission will feature what is billed as a “dream-team’’ of leading archeologists, oceanographers, and other scientists from an array of public and private institutes. The project, which will cost several million dollars, is being financed by RMS Titanic Inc., a company that has exclusive salvage rights to the wreck and maintains a digital archive of 5,500 recovered artifacts.

On this expedition, however, the wreckage will be left undisturbed.

Two types of underwater vehicles — one attached to the boat by fiber-optic cable, the other autonomous — will descend to record the site in detail. Using a digital camera equipped with a strobe light, the submersible robots will create a database of photographs, tagged with times and positions, and feed it to the shipboard computer. To detect buried items, they will send powerful sound beams into the ocean floor.Continued...

The vehicles will take high-resolution and three-dimensional video to provide the clearest footage yet of the wreck, researchers say. Coupled with acoustic imaging and sonar technologies that have never been used on the Titanic, the images will allow researchers to re-create a three-dimensional world. Researchers hope to post the digital model of the wreckage, when complete, on the Internet.

“We want to bring it back and share it with everybody,’’ Gallo said. “It’s something everyone should see.’’

The story of the Titanic, widely chronicled in print and on film, is well known. On its maiden voyage across the Atlantic Ocean in April 1912, the largest ship ever built up to that time rammed into an iceberg and sank several hundred miles southeast of Newfoundland, killing more than 1,500 people. Over the years, it has endured as a symbol of both soaring ambition and fatal hubris.

Despite the public fascination with the Titanic, large swaths of the debris field have remained unexplored, and specialists tapped for the project are eager to conduct a systematic, scientific study, work many feel should have been completed years ago.

“It’s been a long time coming,’’ Delgado, the expedition’s principal investigator, said. “Arguably this is the best known shipwreck of the 20th century, of incredibly iconic significance, yet there have been very few missions there focused on understanding the site.’’

Researchers hope the expedition will illuminate the deep recesses of the sea. They plan to collect samples of sediment and sea water for chemical testing, and harvest microbes that are hungrily eating the ship’s iron, reducing it to icicle-like formations of “rusticles.’’

The ship’s growing fragility is giving the mission added urgency, scientists say, underscoring the need to preserve a complete record for posterity. Scientists hope to determine how quickly the ship is corroding and how long it is likely to remain intact.

Examining the ship, researchers said, will much-needed insight into life at the bottom of the ocean.

“We really don’t know that much about the deep ocean,’’ Delgado said.

Still, researchers won’t neglect the Titanic itself, or the many mysteries that linger almost a century after it sank.

Chris Davino, president of RMS Titanic Inc., who assembled the expedition over the past year-and-a-half, said scientists hope the wreckage will shed light on how the ship sank and broke in two.

“It’s really a bold plan,’’ Davino said. “We think there are some exciting mysteries down there to be uncovered.’’

Some parties involved in the project have clashed over how the Titanic has been treated over the years, with many scientists bristling at RMS Titanic’s removal of relics. But scientists have set aside their differences for the voyage, the first time a team of leading authorities has collaborated on the Titanic, and said it could set a standard for exploring deep-sea shipwrecks.

“We want to treat it like a crime scene,’’ Gallo said. “This could be the start of a whole new era.’’

 The Boston Globe

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