On April 14, 1912, the luxury ocean liner Titanic, hailed as "unsinkable" by its builders, collided with an iceberg in the north Atlantic and sank to the ocean's floor, resulting in the deaths of some 1,517 passengers.
The disaster launched everything from a complete overhaul of maritime safety regulations to one of the biggest blockbuster romance movies of all time. It also prompted a wide-ranging search for the ship's remains.
Now, 100 years after the ship sank, National Geographic has assembled the most complete image yet of the wreck of the Titanic. In the magazine's April, 2012, issue, thousands of high-resolution photographs of the ship's remains have been compiled to show the entire vessel. The accompanying credits and captions are from National Geographic itself:
Photograph © 2012 RMS Titanic, Inc. Produced by AIVL, WHOI - The optical mosaics each consist of 1,500 high-resolution images rectified using sonar data.
Photograph © 2012 RMS Titanic, Inc. Produced by AIVL, WHOI - As the starboard profile shows, the Titanic buckled as it plowed nose-first into the seabed, leaving the forward hull buried deep in mud--obscuring, possibly forever, the mortal wounds inflicted by the iceberg.
The magazine has also posted an interactive map of the part of the ocean floor where the Titanic wreck can be found: