Titanic: Could Jack Have Fit on the Door With Rose & What Happened to His Body After Sinking

The first-known footage of the Titanic at the bottom of the ocean floor has now been shown to the public for the first time. A video released on the Instagram page Now This News shows the footage from 1986. Researchers spent decades searching for the remains of the ocean liner after it sank during her maiden trip in 1912, as per reports, and the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution discovered the wrecked ship more than 12,000 feet below the surface in 1985. Read more here

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Mission lead Doctor Robert Ballard recalled his first time viewing the ship as “spooky,” said a report by the Indian Express. The Titanic split in half after colliding with the iceberg, and the stern fell through the sea before crashing into the ocean floor hard. The bow, however, struck the ocean floor at such an angle that vast parts of the interiors were preserved.

The team was able to film the wreckage for the first time using a human-occupied submersible named Alvin and a remotely operated vehicle dubbed Jason Jr. The material is now being made public to commemorate the 25th anniversary of James Cameron’s 1997 blockbuster.

How Many People Died in Titanic Sinking?

More than 1,500 of the 2,240 passengers and personnel on board died in the sinking, as per History.com.

What Happened to the Bodies?

As per a report by the Week, when the RMS Titanic sank 100 years ago, about 1,500 passengers and crew perished. In the days following the shipwreck, 340 of these fatalities were discovered floating in their life jackets. But what happened to the other 1,160 people is still unknown. According to images, at least some of the unfortunate passengers’ remains are mingled in with the debris of the ship. The subject is contentious; despite 33 excursions to the ship, Titanic filmmaker James Cameron told the New York Times that he had never seen any human remains.

According to some Titanic experts, a violent storm the night of the crash spread the life-jacketed passengers throughout a 50-mile-wide radius, therefore the bodies are likely scattered across the seafloor. According to some analysts, as the ship sank, hundreds of people were trapped within. The condition of those bodies would be determined by how long they were exposed to oxygenated water currents and the deep-sea scavengers that thrive on it.

As per a 2016 report by Science Alert, two pig corpses were submerged in the Strait of Georgia, a deep body of water between Vancouver Island and mainland British Columbia, to test how they would decompose in deep water. Pig corpses are about as close to dead humans as you can get legally, the report, and the research showed that the animals’ remains degrade far faster in deep water than thought.

Previous research on whales and other huge marine mammals has revealed that some large carcasses can go through four distinct phases of decomposition and take decades to totally dissolve. Pigs and people, don’t take that long, the report said. “Previous studies in Saanich Inlet (100 metres) and Howe Sound (7-15 metres) indicate that a cadaver… may survive for weeks or months, depending on oxygen levels, season, depth, and whether it remained in contact with the seabed,” said Simon Fraser University criminologist Gail Anderson. “But, we’ve discovered that in highly oxygenated deeper water, such a person can be skeletonised in less than four days, though bones can be collected for six months or more.”

The Jack Question

After 25 years of the blockbuster film Titanic, James Cameron, in a National Geographic documentary, aimed to settle the question of whether Jack (Leonardo DiCaprio) could have survived by putting himself on the floating door with Rose (Kate Winslet).

Stuntmen dressed up as Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet recreated the classic rafting scene and tried out numerous situations, said a report by En Vols. The two experts were immersed in a pool of freezing water, with a raft identical to the one seen in Titanic. “We performed precisely what they did in the movie, only we increased the duration for each stage since our water wasn’t as cold,” James Cameron explained.

The test team mimicked these harsh settings in order to understand how they affected the protagonists. “Entering water at -2 degrees Celsius takes your breath away. “Your heart rate accelerates, your blood vessels constrict, and your blood pressure rapidly rises,” an expert quoted in the documentary explains. “The faster your pulse beats, the more cold blood rushes through your body and lowers your temperature,” adds director James Cameron.

How Many Bodies Were Recovered, and Buried

The Mackay-Bennett and three Canadian vessels, the CS Minia, CGS Montmagny, and SS Algerine, were hired by the White Star Line to rescue the bodies of victims.

Approximately, 334 was the number of victims whose bodies were recovered from the sea (common accounts of the precise number differ from between 316 and 337 bodies), explained a report by Titanic Facts.

The percentage of the dead whose bodies were found was 23%.

A total of 150 bodies were buried in Halifax, spread among three cemeteries (121 at Fairview Lawn Cemetery, 19 at Mount Olivet Catholic Cemetery, and 10 at Baron de Hirsch Jewish Cemetery).

The number of bodies claimed and relocated for burial was 59.

And 42 unidentified remains were buried in Halifax. Their gravestones bear a simple number and the date of the disaster, April 15, 1912, the report says.

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