The Sinking of the Britannic: An Animated Introduction to the Titanic’s Forgotten Sister Ship

We all know about the Titan­ic. Less often do we hear about the Bri­tan­nic—the sis­ter pas­sen­ger lin­er that the British turned into a hos­pi­tal ship dur­ing World War I. Launched in 1914, two years after the Titan­ic sank in the North Atlantic Ocean, the Bri­tan­nic fea­tured a num­ber of safe­ty improve­ments. It had enhanced water­tight com­part­ments, an increased num­ber of lifeboats, and improved ven­ti­la­tion and escape routes. Those refine­ments paid div­i­dends when the Bri­tan­nic struck a Ger­man naval mine in 1916, then sank near the Greek island of Kea. Of the 1,066 peo­ple on board, most man­aged to escape on lifeboats and only 30 peo­ple ulti­mate­ly lost their lives. (An esti­mat­ed 1,500 peo­ple died on the Titan­ic.) The ani­ma­tion above tells the tale of the Bri­tan­nic in an hour, rough­ly the same time that the ship took to slip into the sea.

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Relat­ed Con­tent

Watch the Titan­ic Sink in This Real-Time 3D Ani­ma­tion

The First Full 3D Scan of the Titan­ic, Made of More Than 700,000 Images Cap­tur­ing the Wreck’s Every Detail

Watch the Sink­ing of the Lusi­ta­nia Ani­mat­ed in Real Time (1915)

See the First 8K Footage of the Titan­ic, the High­est-Qual­i­ty Video of the Ship­wreck Yet