Unpublished footage from the first dive into the Titanic wreck after its discovery in 1985 will be released today.
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Never-before-seen footage of the first dive into the Titanic wreck after its discovery in 1985 will be released TODAY to mark the 25th anniversary of James Cameron’s disaster film
- Rare footage of historic 1986 dive to Titanic wreck to be released
- The new video will be released by the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution.
- It will align with the release of a 25th anniversary edition of the eponymous film.
Rare and never-before-seen video of the first dive into the Titanic wreck after its discovery in 1985 will be released on Wednesday.
The footage, shot in 1986, is being released by the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, will be released at 7:30pm and will show the historic dive in unprecedented detail.
Over 80 minutes of footage on the WHOI YouTube channel will chronicle some of the remarkable achievements of the Robert Ballard-led dive.
The images are shared to mark the 25th anniversary of the release of James Cameron’s classic disaster movie about the ill-fated ship.
It was the first time human eyes had seen the giant liner since it struck an iceberg and sank in the frigid North Atlantic in April 1912.
Around 1,500 people died during the ship’s maiden voyage from Southampton, England, to New York City.
A rare and usually unseen video of the first dive into the Titanic wreck after its discovery in 1985 will be released on Wednesday.
This image from video shows the bow of the Titanic 12,500 feet below the ocean’s surface, 400 miles off the coast of Newfoundland, Canada, in 1986.
A team from the Massachusetts-based Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, in partnership with the French Oceanographic Exploration Organization ifremerdiscovered the ship’s final resting place at a depth of 12,400 feet on September 1, 1985, using a towed underwater camera.
Nine months later, a WHOI team returned to the site in the famous three-person research submersible Alvin and the remotely operated underwater exploration vehicle Jason Jr., which took iconic images of the ship’s interior.
The footage will be released in conjunction with the 25th anniversary release of the remastered version of The Titanic on February 10.
“More than a century after the loss of the Titanic, the human stories embodied in the great ship continue to resonate,” oceanic explorer and filmmaker James Cameron said in a statement.
‘Like many, I was transfixed when Alvin and Jason Jr. ventured down and into the wreck. By posting this video, WHOI is helping to tell an important part of a story that spans generations and spans the globe.”
Explorer Robert Ballard (seen above in 2015) led the team that found the wreckage of the Titanic in the North Atlantic Ocean in 1985
The footage will be released in conjunction with the 25th anniversary release of the remastered version of The Titanic on February 10.
Around 1,500 people died during the ship’s maiden voyage from Southampton, England, to New York City.
The story behind the discovery of the Titanic wreckage in 1985 involved the US Navy.
The mission was to trick the Soviet Union into thinking the US military was only looking for the doomed ocean liner when in fact it was also looking for two missing nuclear submarines.
The team led by Ballard eventually found the Titanic at the bottom of the ocean, but it all started three years earlier, when he was a naval intelligence officer and oceanographer trying to develop his own remote-controlled underwater vehicle.
But he was running out of money and needed funding, so he appealed to Navy deputy chief of operations Ronald Thunman, according to CBS News.
“He said, ‘All my life I’ve wanted to go find the Titanic,'” Thunman said. ‘And that took me by surprise.
“I said, ‘Come on, this is a serious, top-secret operation. Find the Titanic? That’s crazy!”‘
Thunman agreed to fund the Titanic expedition on one condition: that Ballard use the money and time to also locate two nuclear submarines that went missing in the Atlantic in the 1960s.