This rendering of the Titanic is based on 715,000 photos and millions of laser scans of the famous wreck, which were stitched together to create a perfect digital replica of what remains of the ship.
IMAGE BY MAGELLAN LIMITED/ ATLANTIC PRODUCTIONS
Original Source - NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC
Last year, Parks Stephenson stood next to the Titanic and walked slowly around it, gazing up at the massive ship. He paused to look inside one of the boiler rooms and at the position of the controls on the engines. He noticed the number 401, the ship’s ID, etched on the propeller blades. Rusticles hung from the steel shell. Twisted metal and personal trinkets from those long dead littered the ground.
Stephenson, a retired naval officer and Titanic historian, wasn’t 12,500 feet below the surface of the North Atlantic, of course. He was in London, inspecting the ship’s digital twin: a one-for-one computer model made possible by advances in remote 3D scanning and mapping technology. The model is so densely detailed, a video rendering of it can be projected to life-size in a warehouse, where researchers can walk alongside it and zoom in and out on individual features, like a steam valve from the boiler room, which the scan revealed was left open, possibly to keep an emergency generator running as the ship sank. The Titanic twin adds to a growing list of similar models made of archaeological and cultural sites around the world that both preserve these fragile places and provide a new means of exploring them.
Stephenson has seen the actual Titanic wreck twice since his first dive in 2005, but he didn’t catch so many details on his trips. “You can only see what’s immediately in front of you,” he says of peering through a submersible’s roughly six-inch viewport and camera views. “It’s like being in a dark room and you have a flashlight that’s not very powerful.” The digital twin, on the other hand, gave him an unobstructed, 360-degree view of every gnarled nook and cranny.
The scan of the storied ship was carried out over three weeks in 2022 by Magellan, a deep-sea mapping company based in the Channel Islands. Titanic: The Digital Resurrection, a new National Geographic documentary streaming on Disney+, tells the story of the effort. It is the largest underwater 3D scan ever made, amounting to 16 terabytes of data (equivalent to the hard drive footprint of six million e-books). To create it, two remote-operated robots romantically named Romeo and Juliet traveled down to the wreck and systematically canvassed the site, taking some 715,000 photos and millions of laser measurements.
For Stephenson, the quality of detail in the scan opens new lines of inquiry into the sinking of the Titanic. The ship lies broken in two pieces, with the bow and stern about 2,600 feet apart. The hull descended in a straight line and is largely still intact—the scan shows it neatly wedged into the ocean floor. The stern, on the other hand, is shattered, and researchers have never been able to definitively say how that happened. When Stephenson looked at the scan, though, he could immediately envision the back half of the ship spiraling as it sank and disintegrating into rubble. “At a first glance,” he says, “it just made sense.”
In the past, a full, grand scale of the wreck could be depicted only through artistic renditions or photomosaics created by humans. Neither method conveyed precise verisimilitude. The machine-run 3D model, however, is exact. “As soon as I saw the Titanic digital twin images,” Stephenson says, “I could tell. Number one, I’d never seen Titanic like this before. And number two, it felt right.”
PHOTOGRAPH COURTESY JULIA GRESKY, GERMAN ARCHAEOLOGICAL INSTITUTE (DAI)
The quest to create exact models for more accessible surveying started over a century ago. The technology that makes digital twinning possible dates back to at least 1858, when a German engineer named Albrecht Meydenbauer was tasked with surveying a church and nearly fell to his death while measuring the facade. To avoid another dangerous climb, he worked out a way to mathematically calculate the measurements of large objects from photos—a technique he called photogrammetry. Today photogrammetry combined with lidar, which uses lasers to measure distances, as well as advanced computing power, produces models that can accurately replicate the most minute details of enormous structures like Mount Rushmore or the aesthetic proportions of Michelangelo’s “David.”
The Italian Renaissance master’s sculpture was one of the first major artifacts to be digitally modeled, in 2000, by Stanford University. Though not as massive as the Titanic, the statue’s relatively large size—17 feet tall and 12,500 pounds—and finely chiseled details made it a good test for how accurately 3D technology might reproduce objects on a grand scale. Today the tech is so precise that in 2020 a team at the University of Florence produced a 3D-printed copy, accurate down to David’s resolute expression and every defect of the original stone.
People travel to see masterpieces of human creativity because they want to feel the presence of something awesome or genius. But too much of our presence can destroy places that are irreplaceable. Hundreds have visited the Titanic, most of them at enormous expense, including five on the ill-fated Titan submersible. These explorers are the source of significant damage suffered by the wreck; human-piloted submersibles have inadvertently stripped a mast and gashed the bow.
Beyond tourism, sites may be unpredictably damaged by natural disasters, climate change, or war. In 2019, 3D documentation company CyArk created models of Nigeria’s Osun-Osogbo Sacred Grove, just before the sculpture-laden forest shrines were destroyed in a flood. Chance Coughenour, a program manager for Google Arts & Culture, which supported CyArk in these efforts and hosts these models online, hopes the shrines can be rebuilt from the scans. Coughenour’s group supported similar efforts to create digital twins of a cathedral and a historic government landmark in Ukraine that are now damaged by the war.
Her team’s twin of a block in the southeast of the city was made with just a few handheld cameras. The model allows them to visualize the site with the walls of a room taken away, or a roof added, or how the land looked before the building was constructed. They can call up the model back in the lab and continue conversations that previously would happen only in the field. Emmerson’s work has revealed how one building at the site was both a restaurant and a workshop where people manufactured reed baskets and mats—details that help her understand the city’s economy and the daily life of its working class.
For her part, Emmerson plans to make her model of Pompeii and the accompanying findings available to the public, avoiding a common outcome for these projects. Because digital twins are expensive to create, many ambitious projects end up locked way in the private archives of universities or governments. “I did not want the model to live on a team member’s laptop,” she says.
While Magellan has not announced any plans to make its Titanic scans free to the public, the documentary itself shows what’s possible. Much of the existing research on the shipwreck has been conducted by private expeditions that guard findings, an ongoing source of concern for scientists and citizen enthusiasts alike. Stephenson remains concerned the wreck is not being treated as an archaeological site. “It’s one of the most famous sites in the world, and we don’t even have the basic baseline information needed to establish what’s there at any particular time, because you’ve had different explorers who don’t share information,” he says. The digital twin has the potential to allow more visitors to experience it in a less destructive and more collaborative way.
It’s unlikely people will stop going to the Titanic wreck site. Its draw has proven irresistible for those with enough money and motivation. In 2001, for example, a couple exchanged vows crouched in a submersible perched on the bow. A digital twin “certainly doesn’t replace sitting on the deck of the Titanic,” says Robert Ballard, an oceanographer and National Geographic Explorer at Large who discovered the wreck in 1985 along with Jean-Louis Michel. But he thinks it will help preserve the wreck. For those who cannot resist going themselves, he offers two warnings: “Don’t touch it. Don’t get married on it.”
National Geographic’s "Titanic: Digital Resurrection" premieres April 11 at 9/8c on National Geographic and streams the next day on Disney+ and Hulu.
A version of this story appears in the May 2025 issue of National Geographic magazine.