Titanic at 100

>>> it was 100 years ago that the ship of dreams hit an iceberg. a ship labeled unsinkable plunged two and a half miles down to the ocean floor . some are still hard at work piecing together the truth. in 2010 , a team of researchers explored the wreckage of the titanic and for the first time mapped out a massive area of the sea floor . they pieced together to create unprecedented views of the ship like this picture of the stern composed of 300 high resolution imag images. this is what remains of two of the titanic engines. they are very big. they are four stories tall. here you can see an image of the entire bow of the titanic . here is the star bridge side of the ship. the side that hit the iceberg. dr. dave gallow joins us tonight. great to have you with us. i appreciate your time. i'm fascinated by some of your research that you say that hitting the ice been berg may not have been as dramatic as we might think. take us down that road.

>> that's right. one of the early ideas was that maybe it was a giant gash on the side of the titanic or maybe several giant gashes and then the idea was put forward it was ma maybe it was a lot of small cuts and maybe it bumped along the iceburg and creased the plates. maybe it creased those so it caused a lot of the partings in the hull. by doing what we did, what you just described there, we were able to look at every piece of that ship.

>> what have we learned from these images?

>> for the first time we see the whole thing, and not just the wreck of titanic , not just the bow and the stern. we went wider than that. we went out five miles by three miles and mapped that whole area. we got the entire wreck site and the wreck itself and the sea floor around it. we're starting to get an idea of the setting of titanic and also of everything that's in that site. we used to have anecdotal ideas about there's a boiler over here and the crane over there. we have the birds eye view and the aimages that you show.

>> is there anything that could have been done to save the ship?

>> i don't know. we went through a lot of different scenarios wondering about that. one thing that puzzled a lot of people is that when the ship was sinking, there was a light not far away, and that was another ship. when he ordered the women and children into boats, he said have them row toward that light. there's some thought if they had done that or maybe even steamed toward that ship they could have saved a more people and they could have done a more orderly job loading the lifeboats. they could have saved another 500 people. by in large, about 32% were saved. the rest were lost.

>> you have been there and seen the wreckage. what was that like?

>> i've only used robots. i hope to go at some point. using the robots today with 3-d cameras is like being there. it's awesome, ed. even though you have this external, this posture of being a scientist, you have to have a cool exterior, everybody had a job to do. just below the surface just because it's titanic .

>> we appreciate your time tonight. thanks so much for sharing these pictures with us. i appreciate it.

>> thank you.

>> for more of these amazing pictures you can go to rmstitanic.net. that's it for the