A luxury necklace was spotted in the wreckage of the Titanic. AI could help find its owner
The discovery was made during the largest underwater scan of a wreck site ever conducted
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Your support makes all the difference.A necklace made from a Megalodon tooth has been found among the wreckage of the Titanic, and a company is hoping an AI-driven technology can assist in identifying its owner.
The discovery came after Magellan, a Guernsey-based company, used a pair of submarines to produce the first full-size digital scan of the doomed luxury passenger ship, according to ITV.
The project was the largest underwater scan in history, producing 700,000 images of the wreck to compile a complete scan of the site.
The images captured a small detail among the debris; a turquoise and gold necklace fitted with the tooth of a Megalodon, a prehistoric, massive shark species that lived approximately 20 million years ago.
Despite the discovery, the Magellan team could not recover the necklace, as an agreement between the UK and US prevents members of the public from taking artifacts from the crash site.
Now, Magellan is hoping to use an AI-driven tool to discover the family members of the passenger who wore the necklace onto the infamous ocean liner. There were 2,200 passengers on the ship when it struck and iceberg and sunk.
The technology will analyse footage of passengers boarding the ship, scanning them, and running them through facial recognition technology to catalogue the clothing they wore the day they embarked on the doomed journey.
If the analysts can determine which passenger wore the necklace, they can begin the work of searching for the living relatives of the necklace's owners.
The company's CEO, Richard Parkinson, called the discovery "astonishing, beautiful, and breathtaking."
He said the find was incredible considering the size of the wreck site.
"What is not widely understood is that the Titanic is in two parts and there's a three-square-mile debris field between the bow and the stern," he said. "The team mapped the field in such detail that we could pick out those details."
James Cameron's "Titanic" — a cultural reference point for many people concerning the ship — relied on a necklace as a narrative device linking the modern-day story of a survivor of the ship and her time as a passenger. While that necklace was fictional, the one currently on the seabed served as a reminder of the real people who experienced — and many who died during — the ill-fated voyage.
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