Unseen Titanic Photos Released By National Geographic

National Geographic has just released a collection of unseen photos of the RMS Titanic which sunk nearly 100 years ago.

The Huffington Post reports that the “unsinkable” ship embarked on its maiden voyage on April 10, 1912 from Southampton, England. The Titanic was headed to New York, but on April 14th the ship collided with an iceberg and sunk to the bottom of the sea along with 1,517 people.

The photos in National Geographic show the Titanic in unprecedented detail. The photos were “captured by three state-of-the-art robotic vehicles that flew at various altitudes above the abyssal plain in long, preprogrammed swaths. Bristling with side-scan and multibeam sonar as well as high-definition optical cameras snapping hundreds of images a second, the robots systematically “mowed the lawn,” as the technique is called, working back and forth across a three-by-five-mile target area of the ocean floor.”

National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA archaeologist James Delgado, said:

“This is a game-changer. In the past, trying to understand Titanic was like trying to understand Manhattan at midnight in a rainstorm—with a flashlight. Now we have a site that can be understood and measured, with definite things to tell us. In years to come this historic map may give voice to those people who were silenced, seemingly forever, when the cold water closed over them.”

National Geographic isn’t the only publication commemorating the 100th anniversary of the Titanic’s sinking. LIFE recently released “TITANIC: The Tragedy That Shook the World” and James Cameron is re-releasing “Titanic” in 3D this April.

You can see more photos at National Geographic.