For 60 years, the details surrounding the wreck of the Andrea Doria have been one of the great mysteries lurking beneath the depths of the Atlantic Ocean.
Last week, the crew of OceanGate’s five-man state-of-the-art submersible Cyclops I began to fine-tune that fuzzy picture, returning from an eight-day expedition utilizing high-definition video and 3-D sonar technology to capture some of the finest images of the Italian ocean liner, which sank 50 miles off Nantucket after a collision with the Swedish ship Stockholm on a foggy night on July 25, 1956.
Five people on the Stockholm died, and 46 crew and passengers on the Italian ship perished. More than 1,600 others were rescued as the ship took 11 hours to sink.
In planning the expedition, OceanGate CEO and expedition leader Stockton Rush used a two year-old sonar image, which provided some detail of the wreck. Using OceanGate’s technology, 17 images of the bow were “stitched” together last week. It was the first manned submersile operation to the site, often called the “Mount Everest of scuba diving,” since 1995.