Titanic

The ill-fated luxury liner Titanic departs Southampton, England, prior to her maiden Atlantic voyage and disastrous encounter with an iceberg off Newfoundland. The ship was 265 m/882 ft long, weighed 45,000 tons, and was designed to carry 2,500 passengers and a crew of 860. Efforts have been made to salvage the wreck from the seabed.

British passenger liner, supposedly unsinkable, that struck an iceberg and sank off the Grand Banks of Newfoundland on its first voyage on 14–15 April 1912; estimates of the number of lives lost, largely due to inadequate provision of lifeboats, vary between 1,503 and 1,517. In 1985 it was located by robot submarine 4 km/2.5 mi down in an ocean canyon, preserved by the cold environment, and in 1987 salvage operations began.

In August 1996 salvage divers eased a 15-tonne section of the liner's steel hull away from the sea floor and raised it more than 2 mi/3.2 km from the seabed using flotation balloons. The high-tech expedition appeared to be on the verge of success when the balloons lost pressure and the liner returned to the ocean floor. By 1996, the cost of the project to raise the wreck stood at $5 million/£3.3 million.

The results of the first ultrasonic scan of the front of the Titanic, much of which is buried in mud, showed that a series of six short slits was the only damage inflicted on the ship by the iceberg, and not, as has always been thought, a gaping 91 m/300 ft gash. The total area of openings was found to be only about 1.1 or 1.2 sq m/12 or 13 sq ft. The unexpected discovery, which emerged from an expedition to the seabed by a team of scientists and engineers in August 1996, will force a re-writing of the countless histories of the disaster. Although small, the gaps would have been roughly 6 m/20 ft below the water line. The high pressure would have forced the ocean through the holes fast enough to flood the ship with about 39,000 tonnes of water before it finally went down.

Titanic

US blockbuster film released in 1997, directed by James Cameron. The three-hour epic centred on the love affair between high-class society beauty Rose (Kate Winslet) and third-class passenger Jack (Leonardo DiCaprio), sailing to the USA on the Titanic. The film was the most expensive ever made at the time, costing over US$250 million, and it also became the biggest-grossing film of its time. It was nominated for 14 Academy Awards in 1998 and won 11, including Best Picture.

The film's title song was by Céline Dion, and the film's soundtrack was also phenomenally successful.