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Reports written by Susan
Wels
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Images produced by Matt Tulloch | |||
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Monday, August 24, 1998
"I enjoyed myself as if I were in a summer palace on the seashore..."
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 Most
of us on the Nadir found it hard to resist basking out on the fantail,
the prow or the metal frying pan of a deck called "Steel Beach"
below the bridge. The Nadir is definitely no cruise ship—in
fact, there’s nothing more comfortable than a splintered bench or rubber
buoy to sit down on—but today, relatively speaking, it’s like
Club Med.It’s been a grand day for the Polaris Imaging team, too. At 5:45 this evening, the Nautile crew was back on board after a successful imaging dive. Today, everything worked right—the high-resolution cameras, the strobe lights and the computers. In almost four hours on the bottom, Paul Matthias and pilots Patrick Cheilan and Xavier Placaud managed to shoot 2,000 color digital images of the Titanic’s stern as well as the debris field, flying the sub low and slow 15 feet above the wreck. This evening, in the computer shed above the fantail, Paul shows me a few of the color images that they took. The detail and clarity is amazing. In one shot of mangled wreckage from the stern, I can see a little strip of brass, three inches long, with three tiny holes for screws. It’s so clear that it looks like I could reach into the computer screen and touch it—but the real object is two and half miles below me, in total darkness on the bottom of the ocean. |
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 He
shows me another picture, this time of a wheel from the Titanic’s
engine room. The wheel is covered with slick rust-colored corrosion, and
clinging to one of the spokes is a ghost-white galathean crab. Because the
image is digital, Paul can zoom in on details, and in seconds, the crab—which
lives in perpetual night on the seabed—is appearing life-size, brightly
lit, on his computer screen."That’s part of the beauty of these digital images," he says. "The resolution is extraordinarily high, and we can zoom in very close on the details and end up with a lot of useful information." Once the photomosaic of the Titanic’s stern is complete, Paul tells me, he could theoretically enlarge the entire image to life size. We could end up with a virtual stern section of the hull, 350 feet long and 90 feet wide, with every single detail in its place. |
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 I’m
still thinking about that, amazed, as I wander back outside. But the evening
is still warm, and some of the Nadir’s crew are sitting around
a wooden table on the fantail. Above them is a lavender sky, a pale sliver
of a crescent moon and a raucous coral-and-flame-colored sunset that, I’ll
bet, may be too much for even Paul’s imaging system to handle. Back to the Expedition Calendar |
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