How fast titanic

It was traveling too fast. Smith, for sailing the massive ship at such a high speed 22 knots through the iceberg-heavy waters of the North Atlantic. The wireless radio operator dismissed a key iceberg warning. 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. It may have taken a fatal wrong turn. Because ships at the time operated on two different steering order systems, he became confused and turned the wrong way—directly toward the ice.

Mirages and hazy horizons were created by weather conditions. The first argued that the Earth came unusually close to both the moon and the sun that year, increasing their gravitational pull on the ocean and producing record tides, which caused increased amounts of floating ice in the North Atlantic around the time of the sinking.

The second study, by British historian Tim Maltin, claimed that atmospheric conditions on the night of the disaster might have caused a phenomenon called super refraction.

It also would have made the Titanic appear closer, and smaller, to the nearby ship the Californian, causing its crew to assume it was a different ship without a radio, preventing them from attempting to communicate.

To do so, ship captains maintained high speeds consistently. It was also not customary to slow down due to iceberg warnings.

There were reasons for this. Collisions with icebergs were not usually fatal for the ship involved. In , the German liner SS Kronprinz Wilhelm crashed into an iceberg and remained afloat and in service. In the last few years, evidence brought to light indicates that the Titanic was suffering from persistent fires in the hull. These bedeviled the ship even when it was in the harbor at Southampton port. The fires seem to have broken out again while the ship was at sea. While modern ships have two hulls, the Titanic and other ships of that time only had one.

Therefore, the persistent fires which plagued the vessel could have severely weakened its only layer of protection. Still, these were not extraordinary events. The speed and weak hull appear to be the main structural reasons for the sinking. When the iceberg hit the hull, it created several holes in its submerged sections.

The seams of the hull separated, letting in a massive amount of water. Above: Sinking of the Titanic drawn by Henry Reuterdahl, Above: Newspaper report on the sinking of the Titanic, Did You Know? How Cold Was The Water?

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