The first full-sized 3D scan of the Titanic shipwreck may reveal more details about the ocean liner's fateful journey across the Atlantic more than a century ago.
The high-resolution images reconstruct the wreck that lies at a depth of nearly 4,000 metres in great detail and were created using deep-sea mapping.
The luxury passenger liner sank after colliding with an iceberg on its maiden voyage from Southampton, England, to New York in April 1912, leaving more than 1,500 dead.
The shipwreck has been explored extensively since it was first discovered in 1985 around 650km off the coast of Canada, but cameras were never able to capture the ship in its entirety.
The reconstruction was carried out in 2022 by deep-sea mapping company Magellan Ltd and Atlantic Productions, who are making a documentary about the project.
Submersibles remotely controlled from a specialist ship spent over 200 hours surveying the wreck at the bottom of the Atlantic, taking over 700,000 images to create the scan.
Magellan's Gerhard Seiffert, who led the planning for the expedition, said they were not allowed to touch anything "so as not to damage the wreck".
"The other challenge is that you have to map every square centimetre - even uninteresting parts, like on the debris field you have to map mud, but you need this to fill in between all these interesting objects," Mr Seiffert said.
The images show the wreck - its stern and bow lying apart surrounded by debris - as if it were lifted from the water, revealing even the smallest details, like the serial number on one of the propellers.
The new scans may shed more light on what exactly happened to the liner with historians and scientists racing against time as the ship is disintegrating.
"Now we are finally getting to see Titanic without human interpretation, derived directly from evidence and data," Parks Stephenson, who has studied the Titanic for many years, told the BBC.
Mr Stephenson said there is "still much to learn" from the wreck, which is "essentially the last surviving eyewitness to the disaster".
"And she has stories to tell," he added.
Rory Golden, the first Irish diver to visit the wreck of the Titanic in 2000, has described the 3D images as "extraordinary".
Speaking on RTÉ's News At One, he said: "The level of detail is quite extraordinary. To see the whole imaging like that done in such a bad expanse on the seabed is a unique experience for anyone to see."
Mr Golden, who is preparing for his fifth expedition to the wreck, said more and more people are becoming involved in developing imaging systems that provide a level of detail which is new.
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"The bow section is the most recognisable feature. The stern section is a mess. It's a very dangerous area, the images show that it's just a tangled mess of metal and steel.
"The bow plunged into the seabed and the bow is something that people recognise and it's still quite intact."
"The stern area is the area which more or less exploded when it hit the bottom and all the debris and artefacts are scattered around that area."
He said he is not sure if the new 3D images will reveal more about the sinking of the Titanic, but they will show greater detail of the wreck itself.
Mr Golden said that when he returns to the wreck this year, they will take images and will be able to make some interesting comparisons.
