Titanic (2012 miniseries)
Titanic is a four-part television miniseries period drama written by Julian Fellowes based on the sinking of the RMS "Titanic", a passenger liner that sank in the North Atlantic Ocean on 15 April 1912 after colliding with an iceberg during her maiden voyage from Southampton, United Kingdom, to New York City, United States.
Wreck of the RMS Titanic
Almost immediately after "Titanic" sank on 15 April 1912, proposals were advanced to salvage her from her resting place in the North Atlantic Ocean, despite her exact location and condition being unknown. The families of several wealthy victims of the disaster – the Guggenheims, Astors, and Wideners – formed a consortium and contracted the Merritt and Chapman Derrick and Wrecking Company to raise "Titanic". The project was soon abandoned as impractical as the divers could not even reach a significant fraction of the necessary depth, where the pressure is over . The lack of submarine technology at the time as well as the outbreak of World War I also put off such a project. The company considered dropping dynamite on the wreck to dislodge bodies which would float to the surface, but finally gave up after oceanographers suggested that the extreme pressure would have compressed the bodies into gelatinous lumps. (In fact, this was incorrect. Whale falls, a phenomenon not discovered until 1987 – coincidentally, by the same submersible used for the first manned expedition to "Titanic" the year before – demonstrate that water-filled corpses, in this case cetaceans, can sink to the bottom essentially intact. The high pressure and cold temperature of the water would have prevented significant quantities of gas forming during decomposition, preventing the bodies of "Titanic" victims from rising back to the surface.)