Olivia Cavallaro Culture 09.06.2022 02:Sep AM EDT

First Look at Titanic in Stunning 8K Revealed in New Footage

An expedition team has captured the sunken Titanic unlike ever before: in crystal clear 8K video.

An expedition team has offered a first look at the unsinkable ship, the RMS Titanic in a way that has never been done before, in full 8K video quality that is the highest screen resolution available today. The footage was captured by OceanGate Expeditions, a commercial expedition company that provides tourism services using submersibles around shipwrecks and underwater canyons.

CNN reported that the video was taken during OceanGate Expeditions' 2022 trip to the RMS Titanic, which sits 2.4 miles below the surface of the North Atlantic ocean, 400 nautical miles away from Newfoundland, Canada. The high quality 8K video footage features a horizontal resolution of 8,000 pixels, or up to twice as clear as typical; 4K TVs today.

8K Video Footage of the Titanic Provides Insights to the Research Community

OceanGate Expeditions has been conducting trips to the 110-year old sunken RMS Titanic with its submersible dive expert crews, historians, researchers, scientists, and civilian mission specialists who pay at least $250,000 for the unique and exciting trip under the sea.

OceanGate Expeditions president Stockton Rush remarked on the "amazing detail in the 8K footage" which can now help scientists "characterize the decay of the Titanic more precisely."

More than just a clearer view of the Titanic, the stunning 8K video footage also offers better details that may have been missed in previous dives and expeditions. In fact, several features of the ship are now visible, including the name of the anchor maker, Noah Hingley & Sons Ltd on the ship's port side anchor.

With this new stunning 8K footage, viewers can take a closer look at one of the ship's hulls, a huge anchor chain with each link weighing about 200 pounds, and one of the Titanic's six cargo holds, as well as its bronze capstans. But aside from the 110-year old ship's remains underwater, scientists can now also see the decay that had occurred since the ship sank in 1914.

The Tragic History of RMS Titanic

Interest in RMS Titanic was renewed in the late 1990s with the film named after the iconic unsinkable ship. Like in the film, the RMS Titanic struck an iceberg on the evening of April 14, 1912, which impacted at least five of its 16 compartments, Britannica reported.

More than 1,500 of the 2,240 passengers and crew on board the Titanic lost their lives in the accident. The RMS Titanic was built at the Harland & Wolff shipyard in Belfast, Northern Ireland and measured a whopping 882.5 feet long. It was ironically called the unsinkable ship.

Science Alert reported that this will not be the last time OceanGate Expeditions travels underwater to take 8K footage of the doomed ship, as they are already planning for a May 2023 expedition to capture new footage.

The expeditions to capture stunning 8K video footage of the RMS Titanic has the stamp of approval of Don Lynch, the official historian for the Titanic Historical Society, Interesting Engineering reported. Lynch said that the more photos and videos are taken, the more observations and discoveries scientists can make about the historic ship.