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We released Titanic 25 years ago.
Official YIFY movies site: YTS.MX
But despite all our efforts to make the film
as accurate as possible...
There's one thing some fans just can't accept.
They insist Jack could have survived if
he climbed on that floating
piece of debris with Rose.
People even claim to have proved it.
Of course, Jack and Rose were fictional characters.
Nearly 1,500 real people died that night,
and my aim was to honor their memory.
You know, imagine all of these people out there in the ocean.
This is the crowd that was floating at sea.
But if we look at Jack and Rose's plight as a
reflection of real events, it raises interesting questions.
What actually happened when Titanic sank?
Would having more lifeboats onboard have saved more lives?
I think I probably would cut faster if my life depended on it.
To find the answers, I'm going to revisit some relevant tests
my team of experts and I have conducted...
Yes!
Then, for the first time,
I'm going to recreate Jack and Rose on the raft
in a controlled laboratory setting.
So we're taking them to clinical hypothermia.
ROSE Jack!
And one, two...
Three...
I don't think he could sustain this for very long.
We'll find out, once and for all, whether Jack
could have survived the sinking of Titanic.
Well, I think we've seen enough.
Jim Cameron's Titanic was beyond anybody's expectations.
We knew when we were working on it, it was going to be epic.
What a great setting for a love story, this fantastic
shipwreck that has fascinated people for decades anyway,
presented so vividly and so accurately.
To go back there is to risk being pulled down into
that icy water with them.
So it's really a choice between your lives and their lives.
James Cameron brought Titanic back to life as I have
tried to do through my entire life with my paintings
and you can't put enough value on that.
I knew the old lady in her grave,
that's the Titanic I knew.
Jim showed me this beautiful young woman,
we sailors tend to think of ships as women.
He showed me that beautiful ship.
I just loved it.
That movie used Titanic as a stage to tell
a teenage love story.
It wasn't meant to be a historical narrative,
but it created a passion in Jim to follow up that movie
with actual expeditions to the actual wreck and because of
that continued interest that goes way beyond a feature film,
we have made discoveries and learned things that have
actually changed the history and our
understanding of Titanic.
Are you ready to go back to Titanic?
On April 14th, 1912 at 11:40 pm, the RMS Titanic
struck an iceberg during its maiden voyage
from Southampton, England
to New York City.
Two hours and 40 minutes later,
it sank to bottom of the Atlantic Ocean.
Of the more than 2,200 passengers and crew onboard,
just over 700 survived that night.
The wreck remained lost at sea until 1985, when oceanographer
Robert Ballard discovered it while on a secret mission
for the US Navy.
His expedition changed the way we explore the deep,
and changed my life.
Bob and I recently met at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library to take
a look at their exhibit on Titanic.
Everybody that dives Titanic has their own story of seeing
it for the first time.
And probably the most frequently asked question
to me is, what was it like
seeing the wreck for the first time?
I get asked that, "What was it like?"
And I always wanna tell them the story they want to hear...
Right.
Which was, there she was and, you know,
this beautiful, stately ruin...
Yeah, right, right, right, right.
Coming out of the darkness. But that's not what happened.
No.
Oh, I remember when we, this was where we came in,
we landed here and...
It's a cliff.
The, you know, the wall of China.
I mean, it's just a wall.
And the first thing I recognized was the Anti-fouling paint.
Yeah, the red. It was pink.
The red paint, right? It was still pink.
And I said, "Too bad they didn't paint the whole ship
with that stuff."
Yeah, and the bilge keel was sitting on top
of the sand, it was back, back here.
Exactly, it was right, right there.
And then the pilot, he said, "We got to go."
Yeah.
So he dropped his weights and then we began our ascent.
But then these eyes.
Yeah, which is your lights kicking back.
Your lights, all the eyes of the,
like the people in, were looking at us.
Did you get spooked?
It was spooky, yeah.
Because we were now in free ascent.
There was no, we couldn't stop, you dropped all your weights.
And it was just all these eyes and then we cleared it.
It was amazing.
That's pretty much what it looked like to me
the first time except we were down here someplace.
And we came in on her, right about here.
Yeah.
And we had come across this bermed-up mud...
Yeah, yeah.
He came up and we just cleared here.
Yeah, all right.
And then we wound up sitting up here.
Yeah.
But there's also nothing cooler than coming up
on her from the, from the, from the...
Yeah. Yeah, that was our second dive.
Right. And that's the money shot.
And that's the money shot looking up.
We did it for fake in the movie and it's...
You never...
It's the transition shot where it goes into 1912.
Yeah, yeah.
So we come past, past old Rose's face.
We come to that shot of the stem, the vertical bow,
and then we, we transition into 1912.
And we crane up over it and we see the whole ship.
Keep it coming.
Uh, watch your mate there, sir.
Come one. Come on get in a row.
Watch your bag. I'll give you a tour.
If we're going to seriously consider the question
of whether Jack and Rose both could have survived,
we need to look at the hardships
they endured that night.
For starters, the shocking way the ship broke apart.
The film Titanic depicted what we believed was
an accurate portrayal of the ship's last hours.
We showed it sinking bow first,
lifting the stern high in the air before
its massive weight broke the vessel in two.
Over the past 20 years, I've been trying to figure out
if we got that right.
I've dived to the wreck dozens of times and I brought
in naval engineers to analyze all the complex variables at work.
Now, I wanna take it to the next level, doing an actual,
real-world physical test of the sinking that incorporates
the new information we've gathered.
Will it sink the way we portrayed it?
I don't know.
Our mission is to mirror the physics at work as best
we can, and see what happens.
There's a gazillion theories floating around,
there always have been.
We wanna come up with a credible theory.
The whole purpose of this investigation
is to understand, does this hang on or does it go away?
And I've been talking about the bow swinging down
and breaking off for 20 years, but I never had any proof.
It's just outside of science at this point.
And I thought, we'll just build a model and break it.
I, I have no way of saying that that is in fact what happened,
but I'd like to be able to rule it in as a possibility.
'Cause then, I don't have to remake the fricking film.
We're gonna be doing practical rigging with pyrotechnics, and
sinking it in a tank.
I immediately thought of Gene Warren.
I've known him forever, and we've done a few projects
together over the years.
Let's think about what would be the best way to help
hold that up when this breaks.
He wanted us to do a disaster forensics on really
what happened when Titanic sank.
Because water is water.
Water doesn't change its dynamics.
Let's see what the bow does.
Let's see what the stern does,
and recreate what might've happened.
I've been wanting to do this damn model test
for a long time.
I knew that trying to incorporate all the lessons
we'd learned about the sinking into a single model test wouldn't be easy.
Well, that's not what I believe happened.
But I was about to find out just how hard it would be.
"You're not following what I'm saying."
Why did the Titanic go down the way it did?
The mystery of the ship's sinking has
puzzled me for decades.
Iceberg right ahead!
In the movie, it breaks, and the stern falls
back with a big wave, and then the bow pulls it down,
and then it's stern stands up straight.
And then the bow breaks off, sinks straight down, and that
stern's sittin' there and it slowly goes down.
It's a dramatic image, and as accurate as I could
make it at the time.
But I've never stopped trying to find out
exactly what happened.
Over the years, our little analysis team has used
a wide variety of source material in order to try and
put together the pieces of the puzzle that is
the sinking of the Titanic.
We know from the wreck exactly where
the steel broke.
Right to the rivet.
Jim's exploration of the bow section has fine-tuned
our understanding of what was going on during the flooding
and during the descent to the ocean floor.
We got a mass that's knocked aft, all the B deck
forward-facing windows broken, broken, broken.
To me, that all adds up to a very strong longitudinal flow
over the ship.
We see a consistent pattern of the effects of an almost
hurricane-like flow of water from the front of the ship
toward the back of the ship.
That can only be explained by the ship sinking
vertically straight down.
Big piece of the keel, 70 feet long two big frames
of the double bottom, were found way out in the debris field.
They had been ripped off the ship.
By what?
Well, they'd been ripped off by the bow separating.
Bit by bit, putting all these
little data points together,
we're essentially able to reverse-engineer
major key frames of the sinking.
We engaged the United States Navy to build
two computer simulation models of Titanic.
One showed us how the water progressed through
the ship as it sank.
The other measures the stresses in a hull.
And what it told us was,
Titanic didn't need to rise 90 degrees out of the water.
The model calculated approximately 23 degrees
before the peak stresses were realized in the structure
and she broke.
But for a ship the size of Titanic to sink, there's an
unlimited number of variables going on during the sinking.
The computer simulation
would bear some of that out, but
too many variables to nail down
exactly what would happened,
so we got to try a different dimension,
and that's where the physical model comes in.
Hydrodynamically, it's got to be pretty close to
what the ship was, I think.
It's a one-off model.
It's not a 100% accurate in some of its fine details,
but it was accurate in terms of the overall shape,
which is all we really need for a hydrodynamic study.
The biggest part was having this model
float and then sink, like we learned from all of
our research gathering.
It's a known length, right, 70 feet?
Yes.
70 feet from the, from the break aft.
From the break point here.
We knew that the model was gonna have to break, so we had
to put in a mechanism that would allow it to break at
the point where our computer simulation had indicated.
And so this is the hinge piece down here?
Yeah, the hinge is right here.
No, that's not what I'm calling the hinge piece.
The hinge isn't here.
The hinge is here.
Jim, he'd given us some direction.
Um, we kind of got it half-right,
but he wanted the hinge in a different place.
It's what I called a banana theory,
which is as the ship broke, that keel,
the strongest part of the ship held on.
This falls back, and that's there, and then it rips away.
Mm-hmm. Exactly.
That's your hinge piece.
And as it ripped away, it formed almost like a third piece.
It's the keel, it goes...
Like that.
No, it doesn't take off yet necessarily, necessarily.
That's what we wanna understand.
Understand. Right.
It's a kind of a proof of concept.
We can never prove what actually happened.
We can only prove what might have happened.
The hydrodynamic forces on this were enough to snap
the mast aft, blow the wheelhouse off.
Jim came in and looked at it, and what he did not see
is the water flow that accounts for a lot of
the damage that we've seen at the wreck.
So he's directed some changes so that we can truly remove
any latent buoyancy left in the bow.
We didn't have all the interior walls and everything
that would have slowed down the rate of flooding.
So, we used a combination of sponges and foam, foam to
provide buoyancy, sponges to provide a delaying factor in
how quickly a space will fill up with water once flooding.
It' all very catastrophic right in here
and very fast, which is the equivalent of this
wicking the water in rapidly.
Each successive run was basically a fine-tuning of
the model to where we would see it perform the way
that we knew it had to.
Haven't we sunk this damn ship yet?
Believe it or not, we're doing actually exactly,
we're doing the banana peel.
Okay. Well, let's see what we got.
That thing's buoyant, so that's no good.
It needs to be negative.
Then we came up with another problem;
when the ship breaks, it loses buoyancy.
Our buoyancy was foam.
We couldn't just make it disappear when it broke.
So we had to come up with a method to have the foam work
its own way out of the hull to simulate the loss of buoyancy
after the break.
If they tried to adjust flotation in this so that
the break happened where it's always been filmed,
it's too high out of the water.
Oh, yeah.
Yeah, yeah, we definitely got that wrong.
At that point, it became a team effort.
I would drill up this area, right?
Yeah.
This should all be packed with sponge up in here.
He jumped in with us like we were at
Roger Corman days, like he was in his 20s again.
So, we'll probably have to cut these up, right?
There we were, back rigging stuff together, and doing tape
and soldering and all the things that you do.
That wasn't setting the way back machine for
20 years ago on Titanic.
That was setting it back to the early '80s for me.
You've done this before.
A few times.
I'm blown my share of (bleep) up.
We started to figure out how to do it in a way that
we fine-tune the breakup by changing that timing.
We could have the stern fall back more, or fall back less,
have the bow swing down more or swing down less.
When we did our computer simulation,
there was a moment where the stresses on the ship exceeded
the strength of the material.
And that's when it should have broken.
And that happened when the ship tilted to 23 degrees.
So when we sank the ship at 23 degrees, it seemed to do
everything that was observed.
We said it broke at 23 degrees.
So, we were actually breaking at around 25, 26 degrees,
according to this crude test.
But I mean I think, you know, it's telling us something.
We're homing in on this.
And in fact, that was even increased when it broke,
the stern kind of popped up a little bit and
you could kind of see the break.
And the bow swung down and detached and fell vertically.
So we feel pretty comfortable that it, that it was somewhere
between maybe 20 and 30 degrees of tilt when it broke.
All right, here we go.
Let's do it, let's roll.
All right, so props are clear.
And it breaks right at the water line.
Oh, that's sweet. Comes up a little bit.
Sweet.
Swings down, pulls the stern more vertical.
That's the banana model.
Check that out! Touchdown!
We did see some scenarios played out almost
exactly as it was filmed.
The stern going under vertically,
giving Jack and Rose their few moments,
right there at the fan tail.
As the stern came up, and went vertical,
it always turned almost 90 degrees.
And that's exactly what people saw.
Now people describe it standing up like, uh,
like a tower or like a finger pointing at the sky and
that's exactly what we saw.
Yes! Vertical stern!
Yes!
It's not like we did a battery of 100 runs with
a very precision model.
But I think it does show what is possible to have happened.
I think what we're seeing is there's a range, right?
You can get it to where the stern falls back.
But then it doesn't go vertical when it goes under.
We found out that you can have the stern sink vertically and
you can have the stern fall back with a big splash,
but you can't have both.
So the film is wrong on one point or the other.
I tend to think it's wrong on the fall back of the stern,
because of what we see at the bow of the wreck.
There are about five or six instances of hydrodynamic effects,
and there's only one way that can happen.
It swung down, and it shot off like a bomb
dropping straight down.
So, I think we can rule in the possibility of a vertical
stern sinking, and I think we can rule out the possibility
of it both falling back and then going vertical.
We were sort of half-right in the movie.
With each thing that we try, each step that we take,
I think we're getting closer and closer to
what actually did happen that night.
Okay, let's do it again.
That was perfect. Let's do it again.
I'm constantly fascinated by the engineering, the hardware,
the forensics, and I'll get very excited about
the ideas, you know.
You always have to kind of grab yourself by the scruff of
your neck and remind yourself what happened there was a real
tragedy that happened to real people, and it still
resonates down through time in this very powerful way.
But sometimes you forget that in the moment, but I try
never to forget it for very long.
In our movie, Jack and Rose were among the hundreds of
passengers who plunged into the freezing water.
The safest place to be was in a lifeboat...
Which brings up another controversy.
If the ship had more lifeboats,
could more people have been saved?
Mr. Andrews, forgive me.
I did the sum in my head,
and with the number of lifeboats
times the capacity you mentioned, forgive me,
but it seems there are not enough for everyone aboard.
About half, actually.
Titanic carried 20 lifeboats, but they only
managed to launch 18 in an hour and a half.
Now we've all been told that if the ship carried
more boats, more lives could have been saved.
But would that really have made a difference?
Could the crew have launched more boats in the time they had?
I've wondered about this for a long time,
and we never tested it until now.
So what we did was we took a replica lifeboat
left over from the movie with a set
of davits mounted on top
a platform that was tall enough to represent the height
of the promenade deck, boat deck being up on top.
Got a crew to man and lower the lifeboat so that we could
see how long it took.
We figured that it would take about two minutes to roll
the canvas back on these lifeboats.
Roll back that cover!
So we preset our clock to 2:00 minutes.
Okay, so the ropes are in,
and you guys know what to do, right,
to get them flaked out on the deck?
Mm-hmm. Yes.
You gonna do that sort of there and there so
we need to stay out of this.
No, we, we can put it right there.
Well, put it where you would have done it if you were really on the ship.
Okay.
And if we're in your way, then move us out of
the way because we're curious passengers,
and you're having to yell at us to get out of the way.
Politely of course because we're also, you know,
rich passengers in the first class area of Titanic.
And it's noisy.
So, when we say go, ready the boat and then
tell us when it's ready, okay?
Yeah. Bring lines on deck.
Clock is running.
Remove cradle.
Swing boat out.
Yeah, you can see how geared down it is
on that lead screw.
It takes a lot of cranks to get that davit to
move just a few feet.
Keep it cleared, keep cranking!
The other thing you notice is,
was the voice commands by the officer coordinating the two sides.
And in the beginning with that steam going off...
They're gonna have trouble hearing.
Somebody would have to yell back and forth or
somebody would just have to see the other guys working and
just imitate, because they couldn't hear anything.
Okay, good!
Lower boat embarkation deck!
So, at what point do they start loading it?
So they're going to lower down to the edge
of the boat deck.
'Cause then you just step into it.
Right. You wanna step into it,
you do not want them stepping over it, if you can avoid it.
Right. Hold it!
Secure the boat!
Okay.
All right, stop the clock.
Eight minutes and 30 seconds, wow.
Eight minutes and 30 seconds.
Now we're just gonna have to just estimate the loading time.
The key here is, is that you don't know how much
time you have, you've never practiced this.
But just as a baseline, let's get some values for how
long it takes to do each part of the operation.
Yeah, exactly.
So, I think you're, you're probably looking at a,
a time that varied.
Initially it was probably slower, as people were reticent,
and then later as they got more desperate, it probably sped up.
Let's say ten minutes.
Okay. Let's say ten minutes.
Yeah. Okay.
That put us up to 18 and a half minutes.
Now let's see how long it takes us to lower it one deck level.
Ready? And clock running.
Ready! Okay, lower!
You're right, it did jerks its way down and look at the...
You can see how jerky it is even now, not loaded.
It would be like three times that when it was fully loaded.
That'd make it a lot harder to lower.
Okay, pull it. Okay.
Stopping the clock. So what was that?
Just shy of two minutes.
Okay, so that's two minutes to go ten feet.
Mm-hmm.
It's another 50 feet to the water,
so we have to add another ten minutes.
So that's 30 minutes, 30 seconds.
And they were working simultaneously.
They were loading passengers in while they were
cranking out the next boat.
Right.
Then our times can telescope somewhat.
When you start multiplying it out, it should have taken
more like two hours.
From the time the lifeboats were ordered launched,
you had about an hour and a half.
However they managed it, they had just enough time
to get those boats off.
Not quite enough time.
Yeah, not quite.
The truth is the last two boats, the last two
collapsibles were washed off the ship.
They did not have time.
It's actually pretty amazing that they managed to launch
as many as lifeboats as they did.
And what made it even more challenging was in the final
stages of Titanic sinking, the lifeboats were being
launched right on top of each other.
To avoid being crushed, men were cutting the ropes
connected to the davits with pocket knives.
I mean, I wanted to see for myself how difficult that was.
Well, let's raise up one end of the boat in content.
About one inch out of the cradle!
And then they want to cut one of the ropes.
Okay.
No, I was thinking more like a foot.
One foot?
Let's do an action shot!
Let's raise it up a foot guys.
All right, so who's gonna do the honors?
What someone needs... I'll do it.
To go under the boat? I'll do it.
Whatever happens, Jim, we'll get it on film.
Exactly! Let's go!
Clock running.
All right.
Jeez, is this an actual knife?
It, it should have been a really sharp knife.
It's sharp!
But we do know this type of knife was used.
All right, I'm gonna go with your expertise.
I think I probably would cut faster if my life depended on it.
That's promising.
We're getting close. Aw, jeez.
Can you imagine like 50 people screaming?
Yeah. Water coming up?
There's a boat coming down on your head, don't forget.
Yeah, that too.
It's gonna get dramatic here in a second.
I can hear it.
All right, that's promising.
Beauty!
And we're free.
Yeah!
So how long did that take?
1:40.
I would say if my life depended on it,
I could probably shave about 30 seconds off that.
And you go for a ride!
I think if you had more lifeboats on that ship,
they would've just gotten in the way and
it might've cost hundreds of lives.
We've answered the lifeboat question.
Now it's time to solve another controversy.
Could both Rose and Jack have survived?
I don't think he could sustain this for very long.
When Titanic sank, almost 1500 people went into
the freezing Arctic water.
Most were wearing lifebelts.
But death came quickly, not from drowning, but
from the extreme cold.
Floating in 28 degree water, it doesn't take long for the
body to start shutting down.
Keep swimming.
And eventually you succumb to hypothermia.
Can anyone hear me?
This is what took the lives of the passengers who
hadn't made it into lifeboats.
Is there anyone alive out there?
It's pretty daunting when you see
all the names all at once.
Exactly. I mean... How many people?
In this? 1,496 people.
You know, imagine all of these people out there in the ocean.
This is the crowd that was floating at sea.
You know, you, you get so into the forensics of it...
Yeah, yes.
You know, and, uh, studying the wreck and the
breakup of the wreck and discovering the artifacts and
so on, you really lose sight of the human tragedy sometimes.
I know, I know that that was an epiphany for me when I was
there at the wreck the first time.
Mm-hmm.
You know, how that hit me.
And I'd been studying it for months, you know,
but it wasn't, now it wasn't at a remove,
it wasn't a myth anymore.
These were real people.
For the movie, I wrote that Rose gets onto a piece of
wooden debris that's too small and unstable
to support them both.
He's in love with her.
He's looking at not clearly, definitively enough buoyancy
for them both to survive.
Jack's survival might have come at the price of her life.
And that's all going through his head.
But ever since the movie came out, people have insisted
they both could have survived.
I'll never let go!
Fans of the movie have been going on endlessly
about the fact that Jack could've lived,
he could've gotten on that door.
So let's test it, let's do some science, you know,
let's see if he could've lived.
We took two stunt people of the same age, height, and weight as
Jack and Rose to the New Zealand laboratory
of Doctor Jim Cotter.
Jim and his team study the effects of cold on
the human body.
We created an exact replica of the raft in the movie,
as much as we could reproduce it,
and we carefully trimmed it to the same free board,
the same degree of buoyancy that we see in the film,
and then we started playing around with like
how could he have gotten out of that situation
without compromising her safety.
Here we go.
There's a genuine element of danger to these experiments.
All right.
So we're taking them to clinical hypothermia.
When you're talking about hypothermia
you're talking about it clinically, meaning that
the core, the internal organs, the heart and everything are
starting to get affected by the ambient temperature.
Yeah.
Hypothermia sets in when the body's core temperature
drops to 95 degrees Fahrenheit.
As you cool, you lose blood flow to your extremities...
And then your organs begin to shut down.
We're basically seeing how long it takes Jack
to cool down to 95.
We're not gonna let him go more than 95,
it's clinically hypothermic,
we shouldn't take him colder than that.
Our Jack and Rose have been fitted with
three internal thermometers,
one in the lowest part of the digestive tract,
one that travels through the intestine,
and one that sits in the
esophagus next to the heart.
Jack, right now reading 98.6,
baseline core temperature pretty good.
Rose is just over 98.6.
The pool's water temperature can't go below
50 degrees Fahrenheit.
So we're running each test twice as long, to approximate
the effects of 28 degree Arctic water.
Is there anyone alive out there?
Fifth officer Lowe testified that it was almost
two hours before he could row back to
rescue people in the water.
In the movie, Rose is still barely alive,
but Jack has died.
Jack...
So our first experiment will be a baseline test
to see what would have really happened to them.
Whoo!
Okay, all right, now so, come around here...
We put them in the same position he was in the movie,
put her in the same position she was in the movie, and saw
how rapidly his core temperature dropped.
So you're already shivering pretty intensely.
That's, that's pretty early.
Our Jack is losing heat even faster than expected.
Rose's core temperature is dropping much more slowly.
So you were underwater at the start.
No I don't feel too wet.
I think this coat is doing a really good job.
Yeah.
It's made out of wool and that's keeping me quite warm.
Plus the lifejacket as well,
so I feel quite warm around my core.
You've got three big benefits over Jack.
Yes.
After only 20 minutes in Titanic time,
Jack is clinically hypothermic and has
to be taken out of the water.
In 28 degree water it can be pretty quick.
People will lose consciousness and their heart will cease to
function adequately and pump adequately.
And it was pretty steep curve and
it was a very clear curve.
He was losing heat fast.
Dropping down. He wouldn't have made it.
The movie was correct.
Jack could not have survived as it was played in the film.
But what if Jack and Rose had tried something different?
With our modern understanding of hypothermia,
could we save them both?
He clearly made a decision to sacrifice himself
so she could have all the buoyancy for herself.
But what if they split it?
So we'll start with you in that initial position.
The object is to get your head and shoulders over a bit
toward the far side, 'cause the idea is if you can get
your core up out of the water, then you'll be better off.
Okay, I'm on.
Yep.
So, ease up on it, just use your weight, yep...
So the next test is let's look at, what, what if they
just did the natural next thing.
Try to solve this problem without tipping the raft...
Okay. So, you go up first.
Okay.
Okay, you try to shift and a little over.
Okay, shift around to the end so
you're coming in on the end.
Find your balance.
All right.
All right?
Pretty unstable...
All right!
It doesn't look like it's a roaring success.
He says, "All right, I'm just gonna try that again
a little slower and I'm gonna creep up."
So he just creeps up and he gets his upper body kinda as
much out of the water as possible.
Feels pretty stable, huh?
Stability-wise, it's fine.
So if a swell came along, kind of bounced you
a little bit, you're okay, right?
Yeah.
Jack and Rose are able to get on the raft,
but now they're both submerged in dangerous levels
of freezing water.
We started with her putting her arm around him...
Um, go for it.
Go for it, as long as you feel that you're stable on the raft.
But it actually pushed him down and his chest was
awash in the water and he was losing a lot of heat
through the front.
He is still cooling down quite a bit more than Rose.
What if Jack put his arm around her?
Lifted his chest up and put her more at risk.
Oh yeah, I feel cold!
If you think about it from character,
he would have wanted to protect her as much as possible.
How's Jack's core temperature doing?
Steadily dropping. Mm-hmm.
Slower than yesterday when he was more immersed,
but he's still creeping down.
Okay.
That's, that's yesterday, that's today, right?
He's going down continuously...
Mm-hmm. But at a slower rate.
With Rose you can see there's almost no difference
between her baseline experiment yesterday and today.
I would have expected more,
but it's obviously not getting to her core, right?
'Cause he was still getting pretty cold, pretty fast.
So the question is, how do we save his life?
How do we get this curve up.
Yep. Right?
How do we get him up where she is?
My pals over at Mythbusters opined that, "Oh well, they
could have just solved the problem because the buoyancy
that she was carrying wasn't doing them any good
out of the water..."
You're wearing a lifejacket.
What say if Rose spreads some of her buoyancy around.
Let's put it underneath this thing and get every bit
we can out of it."
So we tried that.
The task is going to be to work together to take her
lifejacket off and put it underneath the raft.
Think for a moment about what a lifejacket does, it's just
to get your mouth out of the water so you can breathe.
So it takes you from here to here.
It doesn't lift your entire weight,
so let's say Jack weighed 170 pounds,
he doesn't have 170 pounds of lift
available if he's wearing a lifejacket.
Buoyancy that it's generating is so, so little.
I, I don't see a big difference by eye.
Your greatest loss here would be, would be losing it.
Also, with Rose without a lifejacket with
her big coat and dress on, she would just go down.
The lifejacket thing was, was a waste of time.
I think for the degree to which it compromised her
safety by taking it off, it added very little.
It's not doing anything.
You'd be better keeping it on her and not using it for
buoyancy but try using it for thermal insulation.
So we can bust that myth, guys.
Sorry.
Our tests at the hypothermia lab showed that if Jack had
climbed onto the raft with Rose, they would have
both been partially submerged in freezing water.
He would still have died before the rescue boat
arrived two hours later.
And she might have died, too.
But if Jack and Rose knew what we know today
about hypothermia, could they both have survived?
What would it be like if we just do the best case?
Best case that we can imagine is they both kneel on the raft,
facing each other, use their body heat together, you know,
kind of in an embrace, and she shares her heat
with him and vice-versa and they kind of insulate,
they huddle against the, the elements, right?
So we get them on the raft, we try to do that, guess what...
Pretty unstable...
All right!
It ain't happening.
That thing's way too unstable.
I'm, I'm using quite a lot of energy just
trying to keep...
So Jim Cotter, in this situation, is them using
energy to stay balanced working for them or against them?
No, against.
Any muscle that's having to move is,
needs a little more blood, that's taking the heat away.
Right. Okay.
A bit more heat production,
but proportionally more heat loss.
The only real thing is if somehow Jack could keep
his whole trunk outta the water.
But, they did manage to find a stable position,
with a little bit of trying, where their upper bodies
were out of the water, both of them,
and that's when it got interesting.
Out of the water, that violent shaking was helping him.
His curve now was above the other two curves.
And projecting it out, he coulda made it pretty long, like hours.
But the interesting thing was, he's taking buoyancy from her,
getting into a threshold where he can live,
that's not affecting her.
We saw that, that Kristen wasn't violently shaking
the way he was.
Her core was still in pretty good shape,
because of all her insulation.
But he never gets anywhere near up where she is.
The best thing we came up with was them trying to keep their,
their body out of the water, right?
Their, their core.
I really learned something interesting here.
Is when you shiver and shake like that underwater,
it's conducting away heat very rapidly.
But when you do it in air, above water,
it's actually working for you.
Cold?
And then survival time for him depends on him being
able to keep shivering.
Now remember you just have to do this for another hour.
If that plateau could have lasted long enough to get to
where the boat came back to rescue them,
he might have made it.
He has got a chance.
That's, that's all we can say.
But that sort of best-case scenario was kind of
a fantasy, because they didn't really go through all
the stuff that our characters are seen doing before they got
to that, they didn't just magically teleport themselves to the raft.
So now let's do the real test, let's put them
through a simulation of all of the things that
Jack and Rose went through.
So we did exactly what, what they did, in the movie,
except that we doubled the time for every stage of it
because our water wasn't as cold.
Going into 28 degree water, and that just makes you gasp.
And that's the cold shock, that accelerates the heart rate,
constricts blood vessels so your blood pressure
goes up immediately...
And a guy pushes her under...
One one thousand, two one thousand...
Back up!
One one thousand, two one thousand
and Jack, save me!
Jack!
Rose!
Jack swims over...
Jack!
And one...
Two...
Three!
All right, swim Rose!
And the faster your heart's beating, the faster
that cooling blood from your arms and legs is coming
into your core, taking your temperature down.
So I was really curious to see what that did
to Jack's situation.
And it's pretty interesting.
What we saw was that he got up on there and he immediately
went into the really strong shaking shivering, right?
The two big factors.
Still having enough dexterity and power in their limbs to get
onto the raft...
Right.
And still being warm enough to actually shiver intensely.
Now if she saw him shivering like that and that
he was in worse shape than her, she might get the idea
to give him the lifejacket as an insulator.
Wouldn't you try to help him?
Oh, for sure! Okay.
All right, let's go for that then.
Number one is stability.
Keep the balance, keep the balance...
Yep.
All right.
He had a dramatic decrease initially after
the swim and since he's been up here shivering aggressively
like this he's stabilizing somewhat,
he's still coming down, but this is definitely a better...
It's the knee in the curve.
Yeah. Yeah.
He went down, he went way down,
he went way down to our baseline,
which is our worst-case scenario with his body fully immersed.
So this is probably our most accurate line for what
our characters are supposed to have experienced, and then
he starts to inflect up and kind of stabilizes up kind of
halfway between our mid-case and our best-case.
Yeah.
He was shivering quite aggressively and that seemed
to protect him and he was actually...
It looks almost like on the upswing.
And he pulled up a little bit and he stabilized.
He got into a place where if we projected that out,
he just might have made it until the lifeboat got there.
But what's interesting is there's actually a, a,
a precedent for it in the, in the history.
There was a Chinese passenger who was found drifting on a,
on a piece of wooden debris.
We actually shot that scene.
My assistant at the time was a guy named Van Ling, and I said,
"Van, get in the water!"
So Van got out there and was yelling in Mandarin to be rescued.
Cold water!
So and that's kinda what I based the whole Jack and Rose thing on,
it's like, okay, if you can get on a piece of wooden debris,
you can live longer.
Bring him in quickly! Aye, aye, sir!
Final verdict, Jack might have lived...
But there's a lot of variables.
How much swell is there, how long does it take
the boat to get there...
In a well-lit experiment in a test pool, we can't possibly
simulate the terror, the adrenaline,
all the things that would have worked against them.
Get on it.
Get on top.
He couldn't have anticipated what
we know today about hypothermia.
He didn't get to run a bunch of different experiments
to see what worked the best.
Jack's survival might have come at the price of her life.
You know, there was a, a code of chivalry that men had in those days.
Get on it. Stay on it.
Add to it his individual character.
He's in love with her, a grand epic love,
which is self-sacrificial.
I think his thought process was, I'm not going to
do one thing that jeopardizes her.
There's x amount of buoyancy.
I'm not going to take any of it.
I'm not going to jeopardize her life.
And that's 100% in character.
Now we are talking about a fictional story,
I do want to remind people.
So based on what I know today I would've made
the raft smaller...
So there's no doubt.
What can it tell us about the Titanic sinking?
Probably a lot.
If people are still interested in Titanic,
and they want to see what we're doing here,
they might learn something about hypothermia.
There might be one person out there, in the audience,
that remembers what they see and it actually saves their life.
Who knows?
But if nothing else, it gives you an appreciation of
what those people went through.
You know, so, from my perspective it's about
preserving the history of Titanic,
understanding that it was a real event
that took place, and 1500 people died.
And they died horribly and not the way people think.
Captioned by Cotter Media Group.