A massive search and rescue effort is now underway to locate the missing submersible containing five people that embarked on a journey to see the Titanic wreck.
The ‘Titan’ submersible, operated by US company OceanGate, departed on Sunday morning – and has only around 70 hours of oxygen remaining as of Tuesday afternoon.
London-born Hamish Harding is aboard the Titanic-bound submarine alongside Stockton Rush, Paul-Henry Nargeolet, Shahzada Dawood and his son Suleman.
Here, MailOnline looks at the list of artefacts they may have hoped to see on the voyage down to the wreck, which lies around 13,000 feet at the bottom of the North Atlantic.
Interest in the legendary Titanic has peaked even higher since the release of the first digital scans of the shipwreck last month, showing a stunning 3D reconstruction in amazing detail.
Haunting images show a pair of shoes that lie at the bottom of the North Atlantic on the wreck of the Titanic, which sank on its maiden voyage in April 1912
Another image captured from the wreck shows unopened bottles of champagne that would have been poured into many of the 2,500 champagne glasses on board the vessel
Interest in the legendary Titanic has peaked even higher since the release of the first digital scans of the shipwreck last month, showing a stunning 3D reconstruction of the wreck
When it departed from Southampton on April 10, 1912, the Titanic’s stock included 18,000 sheets, 7,500 blankets and 5,000 table cloths.
Other items on board the iconic vessel included 2,500 champagne glasses, 45,000 napkins and 50,000 towels.
There were also 800 elderdown quilts, 12,000 knives and 12,000 forks, 19,000 spoons, 400 sugar basins, 500 cream jugs, 1,000 finger bowls, 12,000 cups and saucers and 1,200 teapots.
As well as the champagne, the drinks on board included 1,000 bottles of wine, 850 bottles of spirits and 150,000 bottles of beer.
Food included 75,000lbs of red meat, 25,000lbs of poultry, 11,000lbs of fresh fish, 40,000 eggs, 250 barrels of flour, 40 tons of potatoes, 800 bundles of asparagus and 36,000 apples.
Until now, pictures of the wreck could capture only very small areas at a time due to the darkness and harsh conditions almost 2.5 miles beneath the ocean surface.
But using deep-sea mapping, images now show the ship as if the water around it had been removed – and offer extraordinarily detailed views of its final resting place.
Experts hope the unique, full-sized digital scan will help to shed more light on some precise aspects of what happened on the night it sank in 1912, when 1,500 passengers and crew lost their lives.
There is still debate over exactly where the iceberg struck, with some historians suggesting it could have scraped along the bottom of the Titanic rather than the starboard side – as is commonly accepted.
Among the sites recreated in the scan is a hole in the boat deck where the grand staircase once stood as well as views of the captain’s bridge and the wheelhouse.
Another photograph shows the barely recognisable remains of the luxury liner’s grand staircase, where fictional soulmates Jack and Rose met in James Cameron’s 1997 epic about the disaster
Kate Winslet and Leonardo DiCaprio as Rose and Jack in the 1997 film Titanic
In director James Cameron’s film, poor artist Jack Dawson, a third-class passenger played by Leonardo DiCaprio, is seen kissing the hand of Kate Winslet’s Rose DeWitt Bukater after she walks down the staircase.
Jack, wearing a dinner jacket and bow tie, initially catches the gaze of Rose’s villainous fiance Caledon Hockley before the young woman, wearing a glittering jewel-lined dress, treads elegantly down the stairs.
He then kisses her hand and tells her: ‘I saw that in a Nickelodeon once and always wanted to do it.’
In the film, Jack kisses her hand at the bottom of the staircase and tells her: ‘I saw that in a Nickelodeon once and always wanted to do it’
The first class staircase leading to the a la carte restaurant on board the Titanic, which sank after striking an iceberg
The White Star Line ship was the largest and most luxurious in the world when it set sail on its maiden voyage from Southampton to New York on April 10, 1912.
Titanic was cruising at almost full speed – around 22.5 knots or 25 miles per hour – when lookouts spotted the iceberg at 11:40pm that evening.
Despite efforts to steer her around the obstacle, Titanic struck the iceberg, generating six narrow openings in the vessel’s starboard hull, believed to have occurred as a result of the rivets in the hull snapping.
Titanic began sinking bow-first, with water spilling from compartment to compartment as her angle in the water became steeper.
Titanic broke in half just before it made its final plunge in the early hours of April 15, 1912, and now two parts of the ship – the bow and the stern – lie 2,600 feet apart.
Both halves are surrounded by a field of debris consisting of bits of metal, pieces of furniture, unopened champagne bottles and even passenger shoes.
Sinking of the Titanic: Lifeboats row away from the still lighted ship on April 15, 1912, as depicted in this British newspaper sketch
Experts hope studies of the scans could reveal more about the mysteries surrounding what happened on the night it sunk, such as the exact mechanics of how it struck the seafloor
Owned and operated by the White Star Line, the passenger vessel set sail on her maiden voyage from Southampton to New York on April 10, 1912. Pictured: Cafe Parisien on board Titanic
The grandest ship: RMS Titanic departing on its maiden voyage from Southampton on April 10, 1912. The remains now lie on the seafloor about 350 nautical miles off the coast of Newfoundland, Canada
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The wreck was discovered in 1985 around 370 miles south of Newfoundland, Canada, with numerous expeditions diving down to investigate the wreck since then.
But, until this year, explorers have only been able to take murky snapshots of the decaying ship.
Specialist investigators from Magellan Ltd, a deep-sea mapping company based in Guernsey, carried out scans last summer, along with Atlantic Productions, based in Hammersmith, west London, which is making a documentary about the project.
Remote-controlled submersibles – controlled by a team on board a ship – spent more than 200 hours surveying the wreck and took more than 700,000 images of it from every angle to create the exact 3D reconstruction.
Atlantic Productions chief executive Anthony Geffen told the BBC: ‘Great explorers have been down to the Titanic… but actually they went with really low-resolution cameras and they could only speculate on what happened.
‘We now have every rivet of the Titanic, every detail, we can put it back together, so for the first time we can actually see what happened and use real science to find out what happened.
‘It will take a long time to go through all those details but literally week by week there are new findings.’
Parks Stephenson, a Titanic historian, said there are still ‘basic questions’ that need to be answered about the ship and he hoped the 3D scan might help to answer them.
‘We really don’t understand the character of the collision with the iceberg. We don’t even know if she hit it along the starboard side, as is shown in all the movies – she might have grounded on the iceberg,’ he said.
He added that the Titanic wreck site has previously been ‘subject to human bias as we try to look at the scale of it’, saying: ‘This model is the first one based on a pure data cloud, that stitches all that imagery together with data points created by a digital scan, and with the help from a little artificial intelligence, we are seeing the first unbiased view of the wreck.’
Images show stalactites of rust on the ship’s bow, the serial number on a propeller, and a hole over where the grand staircase once stood
Remote-controlled submersibles – controlled by a team on board a ship – spent more than 200 hours surveying the wreck and took more than 700,000 images of it from every angle to create the exact 3D reconstruction. Above: The Titanic’s boiler
Specialist investigators from Magellan Ltd, a deep-sea mapping company based in Guernsey, carried out the scan last summer, along with Atlantic Productions, based in Hammersmith, west London, which is making a documentary about the project. Above: The mangled remains of part of the wreck
A 3D-scanned image shows the ship’s wheelhouse, where the captain would have spent much of his time
The Titanic boasted a huge luxury dining hall that catered to the vessel’s first class passengers, of whom there were around 325
The first class lounge on board RMS Titanic, which was built by the White Star Line. It had been headed for New York when it sank
Magellan’s Gerhard Seiffert, who led the planning for the expedition, said the depth of the wreck was a ‘challenge’, as were the currents at the site and the fact they were not allowed to touch anything in case they damaged the wreck.
He said: ‘The other challenge is that you have to map every square centimetre – even uninteresting parts, such as on the debris field you have to map mud, but you need this to fill in between all these interesting objects.’
The digital scan was shown for the first time yesterday on BBC Breakfast.
Other researchers have previously warned that salt corrosion and metal-eating bacteria have worn away parts of the Titanic’s structure, resulting in a partial collapse, including an area of the hull near the officers’ quarters on the starboard side.
DISASTER IN THE ATLANTIC: HOW MORE THAN 1,500 LOST THEIR LIVES WHEN THE TITANIC SUNK
The RMS Titanic sank in the North Atlantic Ocean on April 15, 1912, after colliding with an iceberg during her maiden voyage from Southampton to New York.
More than 1,500 people died when the ship, which was carrying 2,224 passengers and crew, sank under the command of Captain Edward Smith.
Some of the wealthiest people in the world were on board, including property tycoon John Jacob Astor IV, great grandson of John Jacob Astor, founder of the Waldorf Astoria Hotel.
Constructed by Belfast-based shipbuilders Harland and Wolff between 1909 and 1912, the RMS Titanic was the largest ship of her time
Millionaire Benjamin Guggenheim, heir to his family’s mining business, also perished, along with Isidor Straus, the German-born co-owner of Macy’s department store.
The ship was the largest afloat at the time and was designed in such a way that it was meant to be ‘unsinkable’.
It had an on-board gym, libraries, swimming pool and several restaurants and luxury first-class cabins.
There were not enough lifeboats on board for all the passengers due to out-of-date maritime safety regulations.
After leaving Southampton on April 10, 1912, Titanic called at Cherbourg in France and Queenstown in Ireland before heading to New York.
On April 14, 1912, four days into the crossing, she hit an iceberg at 11:40pm local time.
James Moody was on night watch when the collision happened and took the call from the watchman, asking him: ‘What do you see?’ The man responded: ‘Iceberg, dead ahead.’
By 2.20am, with hundreds of people still on board, the ship plunged beneath the waves, taking many, including Moody, with it.
Despite repeated distress calls being sent out and flares launched from the decks, the first rescue ship, the RMS Carpathia, arrived nearly two hours later, pulling more than 700 people from the water.
It was not until 1985 that the wreck of the ship was discovered in two pieces on the ocean floor.
