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Victoria Pham Intro to Geography Prof Padova How the Titanic Really Went Down

Unseen Titanic by Hampton Sides April 2012

The Titanic has been a famous story since its occurrence, and of course, years later when a famous movie was made to romanticize this incredible ocean-liner. But even from the accounts of its tragic end that dreary morning on April 15, 1912, do we really know how it sank? Scientists and experts from the original expedition in 1985 as well as researchers who follow on this ships legacy 12,000 feet below the sea surface, all come together to explain how far from the truth it really was. In fact, nothing from the physics and science used to determine how the ship sank is comparable to our grand standing illusion of a Queen gracefully laying to rest. Technology has come a long way since its first discovery by James Cameron and his expedition team in the mid-80s. With the team at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute, survey maps from underwater are taken to recreate how the ship really looks, helping experts interpret and understand how the ship came to rest. These images are geo-referenced, and almost perfectly gridded with much clearer image-quality and can focus in on exact details found on the ship. In understanding more about where the ship is now and how the ship got to where it is, new light can be shed on what may have really happened when the ship sank, something of a mystery to all but those who went down with it. Of course, it is always hard to solve a problem if you have missing puzzle pieces, and for Robert Ballard, one of the researchers, it is incredibly irritating to be in such a position where the

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Titanics wreckage has been legally salvaged since 1994. RMS Titanic, Inc., the legal wreck salvager of the Titanic. The RMST has salvaged things from large parts of the actual line, like its hull, to smaller relics (like preserved China dishes dug up from the dining quarters, a champagne bottle with the cork still on it, and many pairs of shoes of the many passengers) to simply display on roadshow exhibits. In comparing this action to perhaps the disrespect of historic preservation given if one were to go to the Louvre and stick [ones] finger on the Mona Lisa, Ballard as well as many marine archeologists clearly see greed as reason to salvage not only a piece of history, but as well as a grave, resting place if you will, of many who did not survive the perils. So even though RMST, Inc. did not start off on the right foot and did not win too many hearts, new management has taken over and all parties involved in the research of the Titanic are to work together in demystifying the legendary story while keeping this lost wonders integrity. Some new insight of how the Titanic sank? For one, when the ship hit the iceberg at 11:40 p.m., the ice ripped along the hull, causing damage at a million foot tons a second, which gave her only 5 seconds before all the compartments along 300 feet of her hull completely smashed open. Due to certain visibility conditions like refraction, which refers to the strange optical effects and distortion in the clear air, and a rare cold-weather mirage, which is when light is bent due to the difference in the air density between opposite temperatures (hot and cold) stacked on top of each other, the iceberg which ultimately sank the ship could have actually been effectively invisible for 20 minutes! Of course once the damage was done, nothing can be fixed. So what was thought of as the strongest ship finally split at 2:18 a.m., when the bow was filled with water, and the stern risen high into the air to expose its propellers, which created heavy stresses in the middle of the ship, where then, the ship cracked. Relative to its weight, the

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ship sank in the center of a 1035 millibar arctic high, the highest pressure anywhere in the Northern Hemisphere at the time. This meant that a heavy force per unit area was exerted from the weight of air above the region onto the ship, giving little time to save those locked inside. As velocity increased, the parts under pressure began to shear off, projecting itself within the water, which some landing a few hundred feet away. Once fully submerged, she merely took five minutes before hitting the ocean floor. So why learn about the Titanic? Why is it so important to know the science behind it? Well, even though most of this is really curiosity and (sometimes) treasure finding, it is history, truth, and preservation. The accountability of how a story is told is a great tool in society, because that piece of information could shape the future. We do not build ships like the Titanic anymore, and we have since modified how a ship is moderated, from its capacity to its crew since then (no more inattentive Joes and Larrys as lone lookouts as based on the movie, for example). This also shows how powerful science can be. We can break that glass ceiling that limits us from getting to the truth of the matter. The technology at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute as come a long way since its precedents when Cameron discovered the shipwreck in 1985. Without these advancements, we would not come to realize that gruesome truth, but nevertheless, the truth. And of course, some of our ancestors perished from the wreck, so its remembrance is a projection of the memory of those who were just like us a hundred years ago, looking and sailing to a better future.

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Work Cited Sides, Hampton. "Unseen Titanic - Pictures, More From National Geographic Magazine."National Geographic. National Geographic Society, Apr. 2012. Web. 05 Nov. 2012. <http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2012/04/titanic/sides-text/2>.