![]() ![]() Less than an hour before the Titanic hit the iceberg, another nearby ship, the Californian, radioed to say it had been stopped by dense field ice. ![]() The wireless radio operator dismissed a key iceberg warning. But in a 2004 paper, engineer Robert Essenhigh speculated that efforts to control a fire in one of the ship’s coal bunkers could have explained why the Titanic was sailing at full speed. Some believed Smith was trying to better the crossing time of Titanic’s White Star sister ship, the Olympic. Smith, for sailing the massive ship at such a high speed (22 knots) through the iceberg-heavy waters of the North Atlantic. Most of them agree that only a combination of circumstances can fully explain what doomed the supposedly unsinkable ship.įrom the beginning, some blamed the Titanic’s skipper, Captain E.J. Now, more than a century after the Titanic went down, experts are still debating possible causes of this historic disaster that took the lives of more than 1,500 passengers and crew. Yet on the night of April 14, 1912, just four days after leaving Southampton, England on its maiden voyage to New York, the Titanic struck an iceberg off the coast of Newfoundland and sank. It boasted state-of-the-art technology, including a sophisticated electrical control panel, four elevators and an advanced wireless communications system that could transmit Morse Code. Considered to be an “unsinkable” ship, Titanic was the largest and most luxurious cruise liner of its day, measuring more than 882 feet long from prow to stern-the length of four-city blocks-and 175 feet high, and weighing more than 46,000 tons. Over a thousand miles from its birthplace and around a fortnight after its collision with Titanic, the last piece of the iceberg disappeared into the Atlantic ocean.An estimated 100,000 people gathered at the dock in Belfast, Ireland on March 31, 1911, to watch the launch of the Royal Mail Ship (RMS) Titanic. It would have been huge, the above water ice alone rivalling the Colosseum in size. The relentless jostling of other bergs on this journey would have battered and eroded it, reducing it to half its birth weight.īy 1911 the Titanic iceberg would have been picked up on the powerful west Greenland current and dragged down the north-eastern coast of Canada. It would have taken the iceberg over a year to edge its way down the 40-mile fjord. The iceberg that sank Titanic would have been up to a mile long, displacing around a billion tonnes of seawater. In 1909, Ilulissat was producing just one or two of these huge icebergs each year. Tens of metres below the surface it becomes so dense it turns to solid glacial ice. Snow that falls at the centre of the Greenland ice sheet is at first fluffy and not particularly dense, but it compacts with depth to become a third of its original size. The iceberg that sank Titanic would have started life as a snowflake 15,000 years earlier. The International Ice Patrol has now traced where the iceberg that sank Titanic originated.Įighty-five percent of all icebergs found in the North Atlantic come from the ice fjords on Greenland's west coast, and the ice shelf in Ilulissat is the most likely birthplace of the Titanic iceberg. They float low in the water due to the sheer weight of the ice, which is why the tip of an iceberg is no measure of what lies beneath. Each iceberg is unique, moulded by its individual journey through the polar seas.
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