Titanic: In a New Light

Description

TWO-AND-A-HALF MILES BENEATH THE NORTH ATLANTIC, I AM PARKED ON THE BRIDGE DECK OF THE TITANIC IN A SMALL RUSSIAN SUBMARINE.

Through the viewport I can see the gleaming bronze shaft of the telemotor steering control, the device that directed the Titanic toward her fatal rendezvous with the iceberg. On the other side of the telemotor is a twin submarine, its brilliant lights slicing through the blackness like flares shot from the sun.

The lights represent a new dawn in deep-ocean exploration. Designed specifically for this expedition, they have allowed us to see, as if for the first. time, the world’s most famous shipwreck. Since it was discovered in 1985, the Titanic has been visible only as a still photograph or a video image confined to the small screen. But inside the twin submarine is an IMAX motion-picture camera, which, in combination with the special lights, will project the huge ship almost life-size on a screen more than 3,000 times as big as a television screen.

This book is about the expedition that “captured” the Titanic and brought her to life in the IMAX format. Its chapters highlight historic and personal elements of the story. But this is primarily a picture book, presenting the world’s most advanced deep-ocean filming system and the men who operate it, and sharing the results of their efforts—fascinating new pictures of the Mount Everest of shipwrecks.

It is a story complete with characters and ‘motivations that are even more dramatically expressed in Stephen Low’s IMAX film, Titanica.

I watch intently as the other sub, its lights diminishing like an echo, lifts off and heads toward the half-square-mile debris field between the bow and the stern. On this. the last dive of the expedition, we have placed three plagues beside the telemotor, in memory of those who perished and in recognition of those who survived the sinking of the great ship Titanic on that clear, dark night in the icy North Atlantic.