Titanic scan reveals ground-breaking details of ship's final hours

A detailed analysis of a full-sized digital scan of the Titanic has revealed new insight into the doomed liner's final hours.

The exact 3D replica shows the violence of how the ship ripped in two as it sank after hitting an iceberg in 1912 - 1,500 passengers lost their lives in the disaster.

The scan provides a new view of a boiler room, confirming eye-witness accounts that engineers worked right to the end to keep the ship's lights on.

And a computer simulation also suggests that punctures in the hull the size of A4 pieces of paper led to the ship's demise.

"Titanic is the last surviving eyewitness to the disaster, and she still has stories to tell," said Parks Stephenson, a Titanic analyst.

The scan has been studied for a new documentary by National Geographic and Atlantic Productions called Titanic: The Digital Resurrection.

The new mapping technology is providing a different way to study the ship.

"It's like a crime scene: you need to see what the evidence is, in the context of where it is," said Parks Stephenson.

"And having a comprehensive view of the entirety of the wreck site is key to understanding what happened here."

The scan shows new close-up details, including a porthole that was most likely smashed by the iceberg. It tallies with the eye-witness reports of survivors that ice came into some people's cabins during the collision.

A new simulation has also provided further insights into the sinking.

It takes a detailed structural model of the ship, created from Titanic's blueprints, and also information about its speed, direction and position, to predict the damage that was caused as it hit the iceberg.

"We used advanced numerical algorithms, computational modelling and supercomputing capabilities to reconstruct the Titanic sinking," said Prof Jeom-Kee Paik, from University College London, who led the research.

The simulation shows that as the ship made only a glancing blow against the iceberg it was left with a series of punctures running in a line along a narrow section of the hull.

Titanic was supposed to be unsinkable, designed to stay afloat even if four of its watertight compartments flooded.

But the simulation calculates the iceberg's damage was spread across six compartments.

"The difference between Titanic sinking and not sinking are down to the fine margins of holes about the size of a piece of paper," said Simon Benson, an associate lecturer in naval architecture at the University of Newcastle.

"But the problem is that those small holes are across a long length of the ship, so the flood water comes in slowly but surely into all of those holes, and then eventually the compartments are flooded over the top and the Titanic sinks."

Unfortunately the damage cannot be seen on the scan as the lower section of the bow is hidden beneath the sediment.

The human tragedy of the Titanic is still very much visible.

Personal possessions from the ship's passengers are scattered across the sea floor.

The scan is providing new clues about that cold night in 1912, but it will take experts years to fully scrutinise every detail of the 3D replica.

"She's only giving her stories to us a little bit at a time," said Parks Stephenson.

"Every time, she leaves us wanting for more."