The railing on the bow of the Titanic, where protagonists Jack and Rose kiss in the Hollywood film, has broken off from the sunken ship.

Underwater robots captured images of the wreck on a series of missions this summer, that revealed how the Titanic is deteriorating 112 years after it sank.

The British-flagged RMS Titanic sank on April 15, 1912, after hitting an iceberg on its maiden voyage to New York City. Around 1,500 people died.

The “miraculously intact” railing on the ship’s bow, part of one of the most recognisable images of the liner at the bottom of the Atlantic, is now on the seafloor.

In James Cameron’s 1997 film of the disaster, Jack, played by Leonardo DiCaprio, and Rose, played by Kate Winslet, share their first kiss on the bow of the ship at sunset.

“The bow of the Titanic is just iconic – you have all these moments in pop culture – and that’s what you think of when you think of the shipwreck. And it doesn’t look like that anymore,” said Tomasina Ray, director of collections at RMS Titanic Inc, which carried out the expedition.

The team believes the roughly 14.7ft long railing fell off the Belfast-built luxury liner, which lies 2.4 miles underwater, at some point in the past two years.

The ship’s metal structure is also being eaten away by microbes, creating stalactites of rust called rusticles, the BBC reported. Earlier expeditions have found that parts of the Titanic are collapsing.

“It’s just another reminder of the deterioration that’s happening every day. People ask all the time: ‘How long is Titanic going to be there?’ We just don’t know but we’re watching it in real time,” Ms Ray said.

Remotely operated vehicles shot more than two million images and 24 hours of high definition footage during the RMS Titanic Inc expedition in July and August.

The expedition also discovered the exact location of a bronze statue that once stood in the first-class lounge of the Titanic.

The 2ft tall statue of the Roman goddess Diana, based on a sculpture in the Louvre, was thrown from a mantelpiece to the ocean floor after the lounge was torn open during the disaster.

The Diana of Versailles statuette was once photographed on the seabed in 1986 but its exact location was unknown until it was found in the latest expedition.

The company is considering bringing the statue, which is in good condition to the surface, and is reviewing the new footage to create a detailed 3D scan of the wreck site.