Exploring Titanic's Debris Field feat. Mike Brady from Oceanliner Designs

Added: 2026-05-26

[00:00:00]Ladies and gentlemen, it's your friend Mike Brady from Ocean Liner Designs. And uh today, once again, I'm a very happy, excited ship nerd because our friends at Mell Limited have released some very cool things. In 2023, they went down to the Titanic wreck and they documented it in exquisite detail. So, they started doing um runs with their ROV, which is essentially an underwater robot submersible that is the size of a uh small SUV. They go backwards and forwards just like a printer doing these photographic lines filming the entire wreck. The idea was that from that photography you can stitch together a 3D model. It's a process called photoggramometry. We've talked about it a lot on the um on the channel before.

[00:00:41]They released the bow section uh into their virtual experience called VRV pilot where you can actually fly one of these ROVs around and explore the bow section for yourself. And we've looked at that in the past. Then they released the Stern, which is extremely exciting because the Stern really hasn't been heavily documented in the past. It's the most decrepit of the two big sections of the ship that still exist. It's the part of the ship that's the most damaged.

[00:01:06]It's the part of the ship that doesn't have as many recognizable features, uh, for one of a better way of putting it.

[00:01:12]It's in really bad shape, and it's just not as pretty as seeing the bow section.

[00:01:18]And, um, you know what I mean? like it's just such an iconic shot of the the front end of the ship. The stern, it's not as well not as well filmed. What's really really not as well filmed is the debris field. Uh there are whole sections of Titanic that were reduced basically to rubble. You know, we're talking twisted and bent pipes and all these things just strewn all over the place. So, Titanic broke up 4 km, the better part of 4 km, um, high from the ocean floor, right? All the way at the ocean surface, 2 miles, maybe 2 and a bit miles. Titanic broke apart and it just shotguned out all of this stuff.

[00:01:59]And where the ship broke apart was right really bang smack in the middle of the big main first and secondass galley complex. All the ship's kitchens and pantries. And so a lot of what we'll see today is stuff from this area of the ship and within the general vicinity of the of the engine rooms in particular.

[00:02:19]Um, in fact, you know, in the past we've said Titanic broke in two. It's not really true. Titanic, uh, you know, there are two big main sections of it that still exist, but there's a there's a good chunk of the middle of the ship that's missing. We're going to see some of it today. It's still there. You just kind of have to know what you're looking for. Unfortunately, a lot of it is currently quite difficult to identify, but we do have to say, as always, a huge thank you to Mellin, and a big up Mellin for doing this work and documenting the ship in this way. Because in the past, you'd have to take a submersible, take it down to the bottom of the ocean, film everything, and try and do some research from what you filmed. Whereas now, we can just load up the footage in 3D and zoom around the debris field and try and pick out what we see. Maybe we can learn some things about the way the ship sank, some things about how it was built that we didn't know in the past. So, I'm going to walk through uh some of these and we'll take a look at what we're seeing and see if we can't pick out some some cool and identifiable things. So, here we get a general overview of the area of the debris field that Mellin have scanned. And actually from this I've made a bit of a like top down map pointing north south to help you guys out with what it is that we're that we're looking at. But basically this is the stern section. Um it's pointing northeast. Uh the the stern is in, as you can tell, really bad shape. And we've talked about that in the past, but scattered around are some really significant pieces of debris. Some of it is fairly distinguishable. Um and they kind of act as landmarks, right? This is a really helpful way to determine uh where you are in the debris field around the stern and to figure out what it is that you're looking at. A lot of what you're going to see around the stern section are bits that were blasted off the outside of the ship as it was descending to the ocean floor because of the hydrodnamic forces that were put on it. The stern section was corkcrewing as it made its way down all that all that way. And so as it was, you know, flying around like that, it whole chunks of it were being ripped off. what you you kind of struggle to to grasp from these scans is, you know, the scale of this, right?

[00:04:30]So, the engines that you can see just down there at the um the bottom right of the stern section, they're about four stories tall, you know? So, if we put a person in there for scale, you'll get an understanding of how big this site is.

[00:04:45]Uh, and then how big these pieces of debris are. And then you can imagine the sheer amount of force it took to rip these pieces of shell plating that stand like four or five stories tall or more uh from the the side of the ship. So yeah, this this whole area has undergone really extensive damage, but it's always puzzled me. There are a few things about the stone section and the debris field that we'll talk about that have always kind of surprised me.

[00:05:22]So, starting off, we're just doing an overhead uh pass flying along the um the general vicinity of the the stern section. So, this is just off uh the the uh southern tip of the stern where it's resting in the sea floor. And the the first thing we come across is something that looks really really similar to what is famously known as the big piece. So it's a big chunk of the side of Titanic.

[00:05:47]Now this is Now this is a section of the shell plating like the Titanic skin that's about three stories tall through in a bit. This is from uh C deck down to D deck and E deck below it. You can tell that's C deck that's on your right hand side because of the big familiar oval-shaped uh utly pivoting sidelights is what they were called.

[00:06:14]They basically port holes in first class. That's where the cabins would have been that you could pivot inwards and point um fresh air. So from the side of the ship that it could like you know bring some ventilation into your um into your cabin. below that on the um the second level down of port holes. You can see very iconic these twin port holes, one on top of another, they were all over D deck for the dining saloon. You know, this was where the the first class dining saloon was, the galley where they would prepare meals and things like that. And then below that, the um port holes for for stateaterooms down on e deck, you know, passenger spaces. Um based on the layout, I was actually just before we um filmed this, I was looking at some blueprints And to the best of my ability, I've I've kind of narrowed this section of plating down to the port side of the ship, exactly where she broke up. So, just below in between the third or the fourth funnel. And um this is a big chunk of it's about frame 48 through 50 aft on the port side. I'll put a picture up of what that looks like. But this is a really cool bit of um the ship because this would have had uh the first row of port holes there on the on the right would have been white with the gold stripe and everything below that would have been black for the uh for the hole.

[00:07:30]So, this is a very iconic part of the part of the ship's hull. It's very similar to the big piece which was raised very famously in the 1990s, currently on display in Las Vegas, and that was on the other side of the ship.

[00:07:41]But this looks a lot bigger. So, this would have to weigh quite a few tons.

[00:07:46]And I don't know, you technically could bring something like this up from the from the ocean floor. Um, but to the best of my knowledge, no one's tried to to grab this bit, but yeah. Yeah, just a classic big old bit of Titanic's uh Titanic Shaw plating. So, in this part of the debris field, there's actually, I think, five of the boilers from boiler room number one. That was the boiler room that the engineers were working uh to keep the steam up on the ship throughout the night. It was the boiler room that was the furthest away from the damage to the iceberg. So, it was presumably going to be the last one to flood. So, that was manned basically until the end, keeping steam up uh to provide, you know, power throughout the ship to keep the lights burning, that kind of thing.

[00:08:29]The boilers play a big role, I think, in not only identifying where you're at on the seafloor, but also they played a big role in actually identifying the ship.

[00:08:38]When Robert Ballard and his team and the the Frenchme were looking for the wreck of Titanic, they had a vague idea of where it might be. They sent their robots and their submersibles to the ocean floor to look. And they found a big boiler that looked just like this with uh three furnaces on it. and they knew straight away, no question, that they'd found a big steam ship uh that had been missing in the area. It could only have been Titanic. So, that was one of those moments where they knew straight away. It's such an iconic thing. Up here on the right, we have a really interesting bit of the ship. This is uh an upper deck.

[00:09:21]It's a part of the ship that would have had exposed decking.

[00:09:26]It's a part of the ship that has uh a teak border to one of its its forward or after aspect.

[00:09:35]And it's a part of the ship that then has deck house attached to it with what look like fairly decently sized windows. And it really looks like part of the Aday Prominard to me in the vicinity where Titanic broke up. You can tell that this was a part of the ship that had decking, like exposed planks, because you can still see these rows of bolts that would have held the planks into the the um deck plating of the ship below. The deck, the wooden decking was quite thick. It was like really heavy duty. Over time, um, it's been eaten away. Parts of the ship's decking were teak, which hold up really, really well over time. Other parts were were pitch pine, which doesn't hold up as well.

[00:10:29]Titanic's ad prominard was almost all pitch pine. What wasn't pitch pine, what was teak, were the margins around the outside. So, it' have two different kinds of timber. All the, you know, the long planks that make up the beam, the um the deck would all be pine. The outside border would be something a little more heavy duty like a like a te.

[00:10:47]This seems to me to be uh part of the the possibly the a deck prominard because that kind of matches you know the the deck kind of pattern here. They would have had pitch pine running the length. The deck house here, which once would have been the wall, seems to have a cutout here for a door at its lower aspect. And then just forward of that, two of these kind of classic big firstass windows. And I'm pretty sure there's an area in a deck that looks exactly like this.

[00:11:18]And then to the right hand side of this, you can actually just make out what looks like a uh the bullwalk, which was the not a railing, but like a solid wall that was about just above waist height um that ran the length of of a deck there on the um the semi-encclosed part of it. So yeah, if if I had to bet, I would say this was a a big chunk of the ADC prominard. And if that is what I think it is at the at the back end of that there. If that is a piece of um teak running widthways across the ship and that would mean this is the part of the ad prominard where the expansion joint was um that was made so Titanic could flex and would have failed along the expansion joint and you know this piece would have been blasted off because of it. But that's a really cool um really cool thing there to to pick that out and be able to decipher that.

[00:12:11]It' be great to eventually zoom in when this is released on VRV pilot and have a closer look at this section. So in in relation to our map, we're now really far north um of the stern section. This is what is called the aft tower. Now basically when Titanic broke into pieces. I don't say broke in half, I say in pieces because there were whole chunks of the ship that ripped off intact.

[00:12:36]What you're looking at right here, this is two or three stories, two or three decks of the ship, right between the third and the fourth funnel that were ripped off in one whole chunk and just floated down to the bottom of the ocean and landed upside down. So that big empty cutout rectangle right in the middle of the um the deck house there, that was the reciprocating engine room hatch. So this is the big shaft that leads all the way down from the top of the boat deck down into the engine room below. And that would have been used to give not only access to the engine room so that you could, you know, haul out bits of machinery for repair or replacement, but to provide ventilation.

[00:13:16]So the hot air, it would have been really hot and humid down in the the steam engine room. A lot of that stuff can rise up and out of the ship. Now, that empty shaft, like a big vacant elevator shaft, was once 10, 11, 12 stories tall, right down into the down into the engine room. Well, now, um, this is, uh, a really unusual view because you're basically getting the view you would have got if you were standing in the bottom of the ship looking up, uh, because this part of the ship's landed upside down. So, what we're looking at here is I think the underside of B or C deck on the port side of the ship. And I'll get out some deck plans so you know what I'm talking about here.

[00:13:55]But, um, yeah, this is all in the vicinity of the third and fourth funnel where the ship broke up just off the stern section towards the north. And we're looking at that big chunk of, um, B deck and C deck. And we're looking at something that I personally find very exciting. Uh, this is, as I mentioned earlier, this is the direct contact heater.

[00:14:16]It's essentially um a water heater.

[00:14:21]What's really cool about this thing is that it's still attached to the fixtures that what sort of held it to the um the inside of the ship. What's also cool about this is it's a quite recognizable iconic part of Titanic's machinery and explains the way that the ship's steam engines and the steam system the steam system works. So, let me explain real quick.

[00:14:43]The steam is generated by the boilers.

[00:14:45]The boilers are burning um coal. The coal is heating uh water in these tubes that run through the boilers. And as the water is heated up, obviously it turns into steam. It's a couple hundred degrees hot. Uh it runs up into the main steam lines and it goes back all the way back into the engines where it goes through the high pressure cylinders, the medium pressure, then the low pressure cylinders. It's then exhausted into the ship's central turbine which was designed to operate in a vacuum and actually draw in the um the the steam that had been depleted of most of its uh most of its pressure. The steam then drove the central propeller.

[00:15:25]After that it had to return to the boilers as water to be heated into steam again that creates a closed loop system.

[00:15:33]So there was a system of pumps and heaters that were basically designed to take the water, pump it back um and turn it into usable water again. So the first step in that process was to go through the ship's condensers. So the condensers basically took um the steam out of the low pressure turbine uh ran it past um you know ran it through tubes that were exposed to cold sea water that was circulating throughout the the condenser units and then in doing so of course as steam cools down becomes water again. The water is then taken through a series of um pumps and heaters and filters to basically take out any impurities, any grease, any oil, salt, anything like that that has picked up in its journey through the the steam lines and through the engine. The water is then heated.

[00:16:26]So, it goes through a set of um the we pumps and then some heating pumps that gets it warm because it's being primed to go back into the boilers. And if it's already warmed up, if it's already hot, it's going to flash over into steam much quicker than if it was cool, as cool as it had been going through the condensers. So, it goes to the forward end in a closed loop. It's gone to the back of the engine room into the turbine room. Then, it's sent back through the wheel pumps and through the heaters back to the forward end of the ship's engine room, and then it's pumped up into the water into the contact heater.

[00:17:03]Now, we actually, and that's what we're looking at here. This is the the direct contact heater. We actually have a really good representation of what this looked like on the ship. This is a representation of Titanic's engine room made by Steve Turjan in 2017. As you can see there, you can I'll put a link for this. I'll I'll um put that in the description so you can look around. But if we were to stand in Titanic's engine room at this level and look forward, we would see a wall. Now, that's not super exciting, but if we were to look slightly up, you would see this thing here. Now, that is the the base of the direct contact heater. And sitting directly on top of it is the direct contact heater. So you can actually see if we go back to what Mellin have um set us through to look at, you can actually see that base still attached to the direct contact heater, right? You can see the here we're looking at the underside of it. Um but you can very very clearly see it here with the contact heater sitting on top of it. So this is really the final step that the the the water previously the steam has to go through uh in order to be sent back to the boilers and become steam again. It goes into the direct contact heater. It is suddenly heated to a couple hundred degrees Fahrenheit, 200 something and then it is piped through back forward into the boilers. It becomes steam again.

[00:18:41]The direct contact heater is also getting rid of gases. It's getting rid of um oxygen um any other impurities and things like that in the process. It serves a couple of purposes, but its main function is really to uh get that water hot enough that it can easily become steam. Once again, Titanic only had one of them, and this is the one.

[00:19:01]What's interesting is it was actually fitted, as we can see from this reproduction, um right inside the engine room hatch, and it seems by coincidence, it's not attached to anything anymore. maybe by some steam lines, but it seems like either it's it's been dragged down, still attached by lines and pipes alone to land in the vicinity of the AR tower, which probably seems more likely, or in the break up, it broke completely free and it just happens to have fallen down and landed um next to where it once sat really when it was installed on the ship. Uh this is from the turbine room.

[00:19:39]I mentioned earlier about the condensers. The condensers are pulling in sea water through um valves in the bottom of the ship. The sea water is going into the condensers. The condensers are running that seawater uh over the steam lines in little tubes.

[00:19:52]The steam is finding that quite cold.

[00:19:55]The steam is turning into into water again.

[00:19:59]To do that operation, they needed pumps to run the seawater up and through the the condensers and out over the side.

[00:20:05]You needed something called a circulating pump. And there were four circulating pumps, two on each side, two for each condenser. You can actually see two of the circulating pumps. They are um lying on their side um just on the bottom right there still attached to the underside of the ship. So this is in the vicinity of the turbine room where Titanic's side curved up and around what they call the turn turn of the BGE. Um you can actually just make out a pair of those circulating pumps still intact.

[00:20:39]These have been filmed before, but again, we have a map, you know, we have a really forensic map now where we can actually compare where these pieces of the of the ship are and um their scale. It's very very interesting.

[00:20:59]The pumps were, you know, part of Titanic's auxiliary steam layout, I suppose, or steam system. They were basically their own miniature steam engine. So, you had two main pumps and two to two to back up to auxiliary pumps. They also had a special double feature. They could actually pump water from the ship's engine room or from the turbine rooms. So, we're flying in now from the stern sections port side. We're just going to fly over the the kind of tangle of the ship's bottom that we were talking about just now with the circulating pumps. You can see those just on the bottom left going out of view. Now, bits of main steam line and piping. Here we see more of those davits and a crane. There's one of the ship's cranes on our on the right hand side of our screen. But all these Davids are still attached to their bases just like the other one we were looking at earlier. And they're all still cranked out, swung out to the angle they were at when they were lowering boats on the night of the sinking. this one um that we're looking at right now, you actually still see that it's got one of the blocks, the wooden blocks that we use to um run the the lines, basically the pulleys to um to lower the boats still attached to the tip of the dambit there. It looks like that one's got one as well.

[00:22:11]Amazing. Now, we're way off on the port side of the debris field, but we're taking a look at the ship's funnel top.

[00:22:23]and the set of whistles which are still there just amazing. Well, two of them are still there.

[00:22:37]Incredible. You know, when when Titanic came to a stop, they had a full head of steam that had been built up because she was moving at full speed.

[00:22:50]and all, you know, all that steam had to go somewhere because the engines have stopped now. So, it was vented through that big central pipe that you you see in front of us. Um, what's really interesting about this this funnel top here is that the lower half or the lower three quarters of the funnel are gone, you know, and so probably the funnel actually disintegrated either in the breakup or on its way down to the to the ocean floor.

[00:23:20]that you know that it coincides really neatly with where the waste pipe has also ripped off. So, it seems to me this is like the entire just the black part of one of the ship's funnels that's been ripped off somehow um during the violence of the sinking or the descent to the ocean floor. It's been enough to knock off, you know, one of the ship's whistles, unless it was one of the ones that was recovered, but it looks to me like uh two of the whistles still there. One of them is missing.

[00:23:55]Yeah, we get a really nice view of there. Look at that. Wow.

[00:24:03]Haunting stuff. Well, to be honest with you, I could talk about this all day and all night, but I hope that gives you some kind of brief, well, it's been an hour, but brief overview of the uh the layout of the debris field around the Stern section. It's very very captivating really. I mean, again, I always talk about this stuff because they they're so impressive, but the work Mellan have done to to capture the Stern section in this degree of fidelity and detail is is really remarkable. I don't think anyone else is doing this. I don't think anyone else is capable of doing this. So again, if you appreciate the work Mellin have done, please, please, please go to their YouTube channel, subscribe to their YouTube channel. Um, they've got their own Patreon. They put, you know, Patreon exclusive stuff out.

[00:24:49]They're doing some really cool work and, you know, making this available to us.

[00:24:52]So, as always, a huge thank you to Mellin for for, you know, helping us do this and bringing Titanic uh to the public in the way that they they are.

[00:25:01]Keep an eye out on VRV pilot. You're going to see some big updates coming soon with the debris field. You're also going to be seeing the mobile version of the app coming soon, which is very exciting. Thank you very much for joining me. If there was anything you saw in the debris field you want me to talk about, please time stamp it. Uh maybe comment and I'll see what I can do, maybe explain it. Until next time, thank you so much for joining me as we toured 4 km deep at the bottom of the ocean, checked out Titanic's debris field. Until next time, stay safe, stay happy, and I'll see you again.