The Secret of How the Titanic knots through a known ice field in the dark

Sank waters off the coast of Newfoundland. The

case of the Titanic was considered closed.
New evidence has experts rethinking how
But lingering questions about what might
the luxury passenger liner sank. have sunk the seemingly indestructible ship
never completely disappeared. In 1985, when
oceanographer Robert Ballard, after years
of searching, finally located the ship's
remains 2.5 miles down on the ocean
bottom, he discovered that it had, in fact,
broken in two on the surface before
sinking. His findings made the Titanic rise
again in the public imagination. Why had it
The Titanic left Queenstown harbor and
cracked, experts wondered? If the official
sank while en route to the United
inquiries were wrong, was the invincible
States.(POPPERFOTO/GETTY IMAGES)
Titanic weak? A few years after Ballard
FOR DECADES AFTER THE disaster, there was
discovered the wreck, the first pieces of the
little doubt about what sank the Titanic.
ship were brought to the surface, raising
When the "unsinkable" ship, the largest,
even more eyebrows when they seemed to
most luxurious ocean liner of its time,
offer physical evidence that low-quality
crashed into an iceberg on its maiden
steel might have caused the disaster. In
voyage in 1912, it took more than 1,500 of
1997, James Cameron's film Titanic, largely
its 2,200 passengers to the bottom. As the
mirroring the scientific consensus at the
ship slipped into the North Atlantic, so,
time, seared Titanic's terrifying last
too, did the secret of how and why it sank.
moments, with its stern soaring high into
Two government investigations conducted
the air before it cracked in two and
immediately after the disaster agreed it was
disappeared, into popular memory.
the iceberg, not any weakness in the ship
Still, the search for answers about the
itself, that caused the Titanic to sink. Both
Titanic didn't end there. In two new books, a
inquiries concluded the vessel had gone to
group of historians, naval architects, and
the bottom intact. Blame for the incident
materials scientists argue that fresh
fell on the ship's deceased captain, E. J.
evidence has further unraveled the
Smith, who was condemned for racing at 22
familiar story of the Titanic, raising more
questions about what caused the disaster.
In What Really Sank the Titanic: New
Forensic Discoveries, Jennifer Hooper
McCarty, a materials scientist at Oregon
Health and Science University, and Tim
Foecke, a scientist at the National Institute
of Standards and Technology, make the case
that it wasn't the ship's steel that was weak;
it was the rivets, the all-important metal
pins that held the steel hull plates
together. Titanic's Last Secrets, to be
published next month, describes the work of
Richie Kohler and John Chatterton, wreck-
diving historians who believe two recently
discovered pieces of the Titanic's bottom
prove the ship's stern never rose high in
the air the way many Titanic experts,
including Cameron, originally believed. The
two divers, whose discovery of a lost
German U-boat was chronicled in the
book Shadow Divers, say the ship broke up
and sank while still relatively flat on the
surface—a potential sign of weakness, they
believe, that was covered up after the
disaster.
When the Titanic's keel was laid down in
1909, Harland & Wolff, the Belfast
shipbuilder that constructed the ship,
certainly didn't believe its design would
still be controversial a hundred years
later. Built in response to a rival
company's construction of a new generation
of fast liners, Titanic and her sister ships,
Olympic and Britannic, were the biggest
ships ever made—from bow to stern, they
were almost 900 feet long, dwarfing even
the world's biggest skyscrapers. Specially
outfitted to handle the challenges of the
North Atlantic, including big waves and
major collisions, they were also supposed
to be among the safest. The Titanic could
stay afloat with four of its 16 watertight
compartments flooded, more than anyone
could imagine on a ship of its size.
On the night of April 14, 1912, though, only
a few days into the Titanic's maiden voyage,
its Achilles' heel was exposed. The ship
wasn't nimble enough to avoid an iceberg
that lookouts spotted (the only way to
detect icebergs at the time) at the last
minute in the darkness. As the ice bumped
along its starboard side, it punched holes
in the ship's steel plates, flooding six
compartments. In a little over two hours,
the Titanic filled with water and sank.
Low quality. More than 70 years passed
before scientists were able to study the
first physical evidence of the wreck. As luck
would have it, the first piece of steel pulled
up from the bottom seemed to put an end to
the mystery. When the steel was placed in
ice water and hit with a hammer, it
shattered. For much of the 1990s, scientists
thought this "brittle" steel was responsible
for the massive flooding. Only recently has
testing on other, bigger pieces of the ship
disproved this theory. The original piece,
scientists discovered, had been unusually
weak, while the rest of Titanic's steel passed
the tests. "We know now there was nothing
wrong with the steel," says William Garzke,
chairman of a forensics panel formed by
the Society of Naval Architects and Marine
Engineers to investigate the wreck.
Experts looking for explanations landed on
another potentially weak link: The more
than 3 million rivets holding the ship
together. McCarty and Foecke began
examining 48 rivets brought up from the
wreck and found they contained high
concentrations of "slag," a residue of
smelting that can make metal fracture
prone. Researching in the Harland & Wolff
archives, they discovered that the
shipbuilder's ambitious plans to build three
large ships at the same time had put a huge
strain on its shipyard. "Not because of cost,
but because of time pressures, they started
using lower-quality material to fill the
gaps," says Foecke. This substandard iron
was pounded by hand into the ship's bow and
stern, where the large machines required
to pound in steel rivets didn't fit. Steel
rivets, meanwhile, which are much
stronger than iron, were put in the more-
accessible middle of the ship.
When the Titanic hit the iceberg, McCarty
and Foecke say, the weaker iron rivets in
the bow popped, opening seams in the hull—
and hurrying the ship's demise. It's no
accident, Foecke says, that the flooding
stopped at the point in the hull where the
steel rivets began.
Harland & Wolff, now an engineering and
design firm, flatly rejects the notion that
its rivets were weak. Tom McCluskie, the
company's retired archivist, points out that
Olympic, Titanic's sister ship, was riveted
with the same iron and served without
incident for 25 years, surviving several
major collisions, including being rammed
by a British cruiser. "Olympic deliberately
rammed a German submarine during the
First World War and cut it in half," says
McCluskie. "She was plenty strong." The
Britannic sank after hitting a mine during
World War I. Both ships were strengthened
after the Titanic disaster with double hulls
and taller bulkheads, but their rivets were
never changed.
Stronger rivets might have slowed the
sinking process, but once water began
flooding six of the Titanic's compartments,
it was only a matter of time before the ship
went down. Questions remain, though, about
exactly how and why the ship ultimately
broke apart and sank. In 2005, an expedition
organized by Kohler and Chatterton found
a new clue. Wandering away from the main
wreckage site, they stumbled upon two large
pieces of the ship's bottom on the ocean
floor. Closer examination revealed the two
hull sections had split exactly where the
ship broke in two, making them a possible
key to the mystery of the ship's final
moments. Simon Mills, an Olympic-class-
ship historian who advised the divers, calls
the find "very likely the most interesting
piece of Titanic research to be carried out
in the last 20 years."
When Roger Long, a naval architect hired
to accompany the expedition, began
analyzing the edges of the hull pieces, he
came to a surprising conclusion. It was
impossible, he believed, for the ship to
have broken up the way experts for two
decades believed it did, with the stern rising
up to a 45-degree angle before the ship's
hull split. "There are a lot of very
contradictory things you can see in the
pieces," he says. "But the only scenario I
could come up with to explain all of the
contradictions was that the ship broke at a
very shallow angle." Close examination of
the pieces showed that they had been
interrupted in the middle of tearing apart—
a sign, Long says, that the ship was still at
a low-enough angle (he estimates only 11
degrees) that its stern could regain
buoyancy as it began to crack. If the back of
the ship had been raised out of the water at
a 45-degree angle, as depicted in Cameron's
movie, once the stern tore off, nothing
would have stopped it, and the hull pieces
would have torn in two.
Why does it matter exactly how the ship
broke in two? For Titanic's passengers, it
may have been the difference between life
and death. "In the movie, the stern rises up
and [then] sinks," says Chatterton. "It's
this protracted, dramatic experience." But
in Long's scenario, the ship may have tilted
over only slightly as the bow filled with
water, giving those on board a false sense
of security. "If you're standing on the deck
with 10 degrees of incline, and they're
saying 'Quick, everyone into the lifeboats,'
you're thinking, 'You know, things aren't
looking so bad here, maybe I can just stay
in the bar,' " says Chatterton. "The
passengers and many of the crew didn't
understand the seriousness of the situation
they were in." Of course, since the Titanic
had enough lifeboats for only half its
passengers, many people were never going
to make it off the ship alive. When the bow
filled with enough water, Long says, the
ship split in two and sank in a matter of
minutes.
Interestingly, much of the survivor
testimony seems to confirm this sequence
of events. Charlie Joughin, Titanic's chief
baker, said that he had been standing near
the stern when the ship went under, but he
reported none of the signs of a high-angle
break. No suction, no big splash, and no
roller-coaster ride to the surface. He said
he swam away from the ship without even
getting his hair wet. Unlike in the Cameron
film, there was no huge wave reported from
any of the lifeboats when the stern went
under. One survivor reported slipping into
the water, turning around, and discovering
the ship had disappeared. "He was in the
water 50 feet from the ship, he heard a
'shloop,' and it was gone," says Long. "That's
not what a person would remember if 25,000
tons of steel fell nearby."
Eyewitnesses. While some survivors in the
lifeboats did remember seeing the ship's
stern rising high in the air, Long says that
might have been an optical illusion. At an
11-degree angle, the ship's propellers
would have been raised out of the water,
making the ship, already nearly 20 stories
tall, appear even taller and making its
angle in the water appear even steeper.
Technical advisers to the movie Titanic say
Cameron, who did not respond to a request
for comment, may have been aware of this
but exaggerated the angle at which the ship
sank for effect.
Though experts still quibble about the exact
nature of how the ship broke up, a
consensus does seem to be forming around
how Titanic sank. "We all agree that the ship
did sink at a shallow angle," says Garzke,
head of the naval architects' forensics
panel. Historians believe Harland & Wolff
was probably aware of this at the time, but
when the official inquiries absolved the
shipbuilder of any liability in the matter,
the company didn't protest.
Some conspiracy theorists believe that the
company's silence was a sign of a coverup,
and that the post-disaster retrofitting of
Titanic's sister ships proves Harland &
Wolff knew its ship was flawed. But most
historians come to a different conclusion.
"The fact that the ship broke up on the
surface does not mean she was weak," says
Long. When 38,000 tons of water filled its
bow, pushing the stern up even 11 degrees
out of the water, the ship was loaded beyond
its capacity and cracked in two.
Could the Titanic have been stronger?
Certainly. Higher-quality rivets or a
thicker hull might have kept the ship
afloat longer. But ultimately, the Titanic
was designed to be a passenger liner, not a
battleship. "[The ship] was built to the best
of their knowledge at the time and to the
proper standards. Nothing could have
survived what happened to it," says
McCluskie. Extensive forensic analysis of
the wreckage has, in a way, brought the
story of the Titanic to a familiar place. "The
ship," says Foecke, "was just not designed to
run into icebergs." When it did, nothing
could stop its journey to the bottom.