Posting #3
Science
"The Iceberg Was Only Part of It"
by William J. Broad
NewYorkTimes, April 9, 2012
2 pages
With hundreds of books and studies, there're a lot of discussions about how a ship that so costly and well built ended so badly about Titanic. A century after the liner went down in the early hours of April 15, 1912, two new studies argue that rare states of nature played major roes in this tragedy. The first study says Earth's nearness to the Moon and the Sun is not matched for more than a thousand years, which resulted in record tides that explained why the Titanic encountered so much ice, including the fatal iceberg. The second study reported that the icy waters created ideal conditions for an unusual type of mirage that hid icebergs from lookouts and confused passed ships and delayed rescue efforts for hours.
The author Tim Maltin said:"There were no heroes, no villains. Instead, there were a lot of human beings trying to do their best in the situation they met." He just published his new book "Titanic: A Very Deceiving Night" as an e-book this week, point how mirage could make havoc with human observations.
From the start, news reporters and inquiries said the ice in the North Atlantic was unusually bad that year. The New York Times, after the sinking, posted a short article that quoted U.S. officials as saying that the winter had produced "an enormously large crop of icebergs".
Recently, a team of researchers from Texas State University-San Marcos discovered that Earth had come unusually close to the Moon and the Sun that winter, enhancing the gravitational pulls on the ocean and produced record tides, which took place between December 1911 and February 1912---about two months before the disaster.
In the case, the mirage occurs when cold air bends light rays downward, observers can see only the objects setting far over the horizon, the images often undergo quick distortions.
I was surprised to find that against common knowledge, the ice berg wasn't the only thing that sunk the titanic. It was all just bad luck and coincidence that the earth was really close to the moon and sun causing a host of seafaring problems. I was unaware that mirages caused by the cold air could appear at sea. That when added to the large amounts of ice and high tides doomed the titanic from the start.
ReplyDeleteThis sheds new light on a tragedy that we thought we understood. The sinking of the ship may have come by complete surprise to the crew. In addition, they may not have known about the icy conditions, and may have been at a latitude where they didn’t expect to see any ice. Combine the two, and they don’t see hidden ice where they don’t expect to see ice—yet the ice was there.
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