About Titanic 4D

Titanic 4D is an interactive reconstruction of the sinking of RMS Titanic on the night of 14–15 April 1912. It can be explored in space, around, above and below the ship, and in time, from the collision with the iceberg at 11:40 p.m. to the foundering at 2:20 a.m., then down to the two sections of the wreck on the seabed.

Between 1,490 and 1,517 people died that night, depending on the source. The count of each source is given in "The night in words". The reconstruction shows the ship, the sea and the sky. It does not depict the people aboard and it has no sound.

How it is made

Everything shown is computed from a set of dated records: the attitude of the hull, the water in each compartment, the lifeboats, the distress signals, the lighting, the break-up. Every record names its sources and carries one of three levels of certainty:

• Established: primary evidence and broad agreement.
• Estimated: derived or approximate.
• Debated: sources disagree.

Where the sources disagree, the competing positions are kept side by side instead of being settled arbitrarily: the counts of lives lost are given source by source in "The night in words", and the distance of the SS Californian, like the times of the boats, in the "Sources" tab of the reconstruction as well. The scene at any instant depends on that instant alone, so the night can be played forward, backward or at any speed and always shows the same thing at the same time.

Times are ship's time, 2 h 02 min ahead of New York time and 2 h 58 min behind Greenwich Mean Time. The sky is computed for the date, the hour and the place from a star catalogue and an ephemeris; the Moon was below the horizon all night.

What is not a historical record

Some of what the scene shows is not in the sources and is drawn for want of anything better: the exact shape of the iceberg, the detail of the deckhouses, the paths of the lifeboats once they had left the ship, the height reached by the distress signals. The break-up follows the reconstruction published by the Marine Forensics Panel of the Society of Naval Architects and Marine Engineers, which its authors do not present as proven. The "Sources" tab of the reconstruction says, for each instant, what is established, what is estimated and what is debated.

Sources

The dataset draws on 39 sources: the reports and testimony of the British and American inquiries of 1912, later forensic studies and surveys of the wreck. The night in words tells the whole night in text, with the sources of each event. The data, the code and the method are published in the project repository.

Contact

Corrections and questions are welcome at contact@titanic-4d.org.