Necklace Found

A necklace that has not been worn or seen since the sinking of the RMS Titanic has been discovered in the ship’s wreckage.

Guernsey-based firm Magellan has produced the first full-sized digital scan of the luxury passenger liner which sank in the North Atlantic Ocean on 15 April 1912 after striking an iceberg.

In the largest underwater scanning project in history, the deep-water investigation specialist used two submarines to produce 700,000 images of the wreck, which were then made into a moving scan.

The images picked up a necklace made from the tooth of a Megalodon, a pre-historic shark, with gold jewellery built into it.

An agreement between the UK and the US prevents members of the public from removing artefacts from the wreck and surrounding bed.

The team from Magellan were therefore not allowed to touch the wreckage on the seabed and had to leave the necklace at the site.

In a bid to seek out the jewellery’s owner, Magellan is using artificial intelligence to contact the family members of the 2,200 passengers onboard the Titanic when it sank.

Footage of passengers boarding the ship will be analysed with the technology, including facial recognition and the clothes that they were wearing.

A necklace plays a key part in the 1997 film, Titanic, starring Leonardo di Caprio and Kate Winslet.

Whilst the artefact found is not the same famous necklace – which was created for the film – the discovery of the Megalodon tooth necklace is poignant.

Richard Parkinson, CEO of Magellan, describes the find as “astonishing, beautiful and breathtaking.”