April 15, 2012, marks the 100th anniversary of the sinking of the RMS Titanic, and a century later the world remains fascinated by the ill-fated ocean liner.
The ship, carrying more than 2,200 passengers and crew, set sail on April 10, 1912, on her maiden voyage from Southampton, England, to New York City.
At the time the Titanic, built in Belfast, Ireland, was the largest passenger ship on the ocean, and the White Star Line billed the ship “unsinkable.”
Shortly after 11:30 p.m. April 14 Titanic struck an iceberg, and early the next morning the ship split and sank.
More than 1,500 people died. The RMS Carpathia picked up the the survivors in the lifeboats hours later.
The ship's sinking had worldwide repercussions, and for decades the wreck went undiscovered.
In 1985 the ship was discovered in 12,400 feet in the North Atlantic. The following year, the U.S. Congress passed the RMS Titanic Memorial Act to recognize the wreck site's discovery and its historical and cultural significance.
Answering the lingering questions
One hundred years after the sinking of the Titanic, a mystery still surrounds the cause of the events on that tragic night in April 1912.
On a clear night, under a sky of bright stars, how could two expertly trained lookouts miss an enormous iceberg lying directly in the ship's path? Furthermore, why did it take so long for help to arrive?
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's National Climatic Data Center (NCDC) may finally have given researchers the information needed to conclusively answer these questions.
Researchers used NCDC's data archive, which contains hundreds of millions of records stretching back as far as the mid-1700s, as their most significant source to uncover the real reason the Titanic sank.
NCDC archivists provided researchers with 75 Greenwich Mean Noon (GMN) ship observation forms from April 1912 containing air and sea surface temperatures in the vicinity of the wreck site.
These documents also contained observer comments and sketches of sea ice that proved to be just as valuable as the data. Some of these comments included ominous phrases such as “much refraction on the horizon.”
These comments and data would establish the framework for British Titanic historian Tim Matlin's new theory that a mirage actually played a major role in causing the Titanic to sink.
Observations recorded in the logbooks provided evidence of the recent arrival of the cold water Labrador Current in the area.
This current cooled the warm air above the Gulf Stream from the bottom up resulting in a strong thermal inversion, which causes light to bend.
This refraction would have made the horizon appear higher than normal, camouflaging the iceberg from view until it was too late.
The temperature inversion, with the warmer air aloft, would also have scrambled the Titanic's Morse code signal and caused the distress rockets to appear lower in the sky to nearby ships, making the rescue effort exceedingly difficult.
These data records, never before used in such a capacity, also assisted Matlin and his team in the production of “Titanic: Case Closed,” a 96-minute documentary that explains his theory in detail with vivid effects and dramatic first-hand accounts.
However, these records might not have even been available without the preservation work of the Climate Database Modernization Program (CDMP) at NCDC.
The CDMP team imaged the century-old forms to permanently preserve them and make them digitally available to others.
A critical telegram
Historians also have discovered that a telegram from another ship could have saved Titanic.
On April 14, 1912, the German-flagged S.S. Amerika also was steaming for the United States, just ahead of Titanic.
When the Amerika encountered several large icebergs near 41°27'N, 50°8'W – in the middle of the Atlantic – she passed the message on to the hydrographic office – a precursor to the Defense Mapping Agency Hydrographic Center – in Washington, D.C., via the Titanic's radio relay.
The Amerika's radio antennae were not large enough to get messages to the ground relay station at Cape Race, Newfoundland, Canada from her distance, and it was common practice for other larger ships to relay messages.
As a result of this radio relay, the Titanic actually had the location of the icebergs that they struck one day later.
The resultant fallout from this maritime disaster put into motion the Safety of Life at Sea (SOLAS) Convention in 1914, which, after subsequent meetings, includes a global requirement for baseline weather forecasts to ensure safer ocean voyages worldwide. The United States was one of the original signatories of this convention.
Today, the National Weather Service, through the Ocean Prediction Center, National Hurricane Center, and Honolulu, Hawaii Weather Forecast Office, assumed the obligation to issue warnings and forecasts for the North Atlantic and North Pacific Oceans.
For more visit www.noaa.gov/titanic .