[/caption]
The deadly Costa Concordia shipwreck has been captured in a stunning high resolution image from space that vividly shows the magnitude of the awful disaster with the huge luxury cruise ship precariously tipped on its side just off of the Tuscan coastline of the Italian Island of Giglio [Isola del Giglio]. See the full image and close-up below.
The newly released image was taken by a commercial owned by DigitalGlobe and flying some 300 miles overhead in low Earth orbit. The photo from a WorldView satellite was snapped on January 17, 2012 and shows exactly where the cruise ship ran aground five days ago on Friday, January 13, 2012 when it was steered way to close to the shoreline.
The photo is a surreal view of the massive ship on its side, submerged on the shoreline in the Mediterranean Sea snapped through scattered clouds. The sight is something really hard to believe – imagine the movie Titanic.
off the Tuscan coastline of Giglio, Italy
The Costa Concordia cruise ship had just left port with over 3200 passengers and 1000 crew members aboard and was sailing extremely close to Giglio Island when it apparently struck underwater rocks that suddenly ripped a gigantic gash through the hull and capsized the ship, sending the terrified passengers scrambling for their lives.
The Mediterranean waters temperature was about 57 F.
Shocking infrared video shows people frantically crawling over the side of the listing ship – tilted completely on its side – frantically trying to get into the lifeboats using rope lines – at night.
Passengers said it was an “Out of body experience.” Strangers helping strangers
Amazing new video shows the rocks clearly embedded in the hull of the wrecked ship.
The ship soon began listing off the Italian coastline in darkness. At a moment’s notice objects started flying through the air and the frightened passengers boarded lifeboats as fast as they could, apparently with no practice training beforehand.
The Costa Concordia luxury cruise ship ran aground in the Tuscan waters off of Giglio,Italy on Friday, January, 2012. Giglio Island at left, the Mediterranean Sea at right. Credit: DIGITALGLOBE
11 people are confirmed dead so far and about two dozen people are still missing today as emergency rescue crews furiously search every nook and cranny on the cruise ship in a desperate bid to find anyone who may still be alive.
Click to enlarge
Rescues divers have used explosives to gain entry to portions of the ship searching for any survivors.
Rescue efforts were temporarily suspended today (Jan. 18) due to rough seas. The Costa Concordia is loaded with several thousand gallons of diesel fuel oil which could contaminate the surroundings.
According to the DigitalGlobe website, the Colorado based company owns and operates the most sophisticated constellation of high-resolution commercial earth imaging satellites – . QuickBird, WorldView-1 and WorldView-2 which are capable of collecting over 500 million km2 of quality imagery per year with high resolution cameras.
The DigitalGlobe satellites are used for defense and intelligence, civil agencies, mapping and analysis, environmental monitoring and oil and gas exploration.
Now look in the opposite direction and see fabulous photos of the ISS crossing the Moon shot from a telescope in Houston, Texas
Dazzling Photos of the International Space Station Crossing the Moon!
“Amazing new video shows the rocks clearly embedded in the hull of the wrecked ship.”
The link on the word “wrecked” leads to a UT story on the Phobos Grunt.
That kinda thing happens quite a lot… I think UT uses software to automatically pick out key words and link to related articles… not always sucessfully!
They have never worked on this site. The automatically generated links do more harm than good
I’m inclined to agree. Sampling a few random links takes one to completely unrelated pages. I suggest either taking the time to link to actually relevant material or just turn off the “auto-linking”.
YOU can turn them off at your web browser, for free, forever and for good web browser hygiene and computer security. There are many solutions, but most people seem to use noscript.net. Easy.
Looks like a poor fake image. Ship far too large and floating above the clouds!!!!
No it doesn’t, no it’s not and no it’s not.
Ottimo, pure qui siam finiti -.-
It’s a fake.
Go look at a webcam of the port:
http://www.webcams.travel/webcam/1298809230-Weather-Isola-del-Giglio-Panoramica-Porto-Giglio-Porto
It’s not fake. You realize the image is in gray scale, right?
Doing a quick measurement in Google Earth of the location shows the ship to be about 300m long. According to Wikipedia it’s 290m. So I’m inclined to believe the image is legit.
And if you squint and look closely, I believe you can see the captain “tripping and falling into a lifeboat”….
So that is what it would look like to an ET monitoring us for low earth orbit. They’d probably wonder why we don’t pilot our ships better.