Titanic Bow Replica. Image: Aidan McMichael (Flickr, used under a CC BY-ND 3.0)
Even a century after the “unsinkable” ship disappeared beneath the waves, scientists, researchers, and historians continued to study what exactly caused the ship’s demise. One of these researchers is Richard Corfield, a science writer who decided to take a fresh look into the mathematics and physics of the sinking of the Titanic.
At 11.40 pm on Sunday 14 April 1912 the Titanic, bound from Southampton to New York, struck an iceberg just off the coast of Newfoundland and became fully submerged within three hours, before dropping four kilometres to the bottom of the Atlantic.
There have been many stories recounting why the ship struck the iceberg and why two-thirds of the passengers and crew lost their lives: the lack of lifeboats; the absence of binoculars in the crow’s nest; the shortcomings of the radio operator. However, in this article, Corfield takes a more in-depth look at the structural deficiencies of the ship and how these contributed to its demise.
A fatal flaw
Corfield highlights the work of two metallurgists, Tim Foecke and Jennifer Hooper McCarty, who combined their own analysis with historical records from the shipyard in Belfast where the Titanic was built and found that the rivets that held the ship’s hull together were not uniform in composition or quality and not been inserted in a uniform fashion.
RMS Titanic under construction. (Public domain), via Wikimedia Commons
“Foecke and McCarty found that the rivets at the front and rear fifths of the Titanic were made only of ‘best’ quality iron, not ‘best-best,’ and had been inserted by hand,” wrote Corfield.
These “best” rivets contained material full of impure material meaning they were likely to fail and “pop off” under stress.
This meant that, in practice, the region of the Titanic’s hull that hit the iceberg was substantially weaker than the main body of the ship Foecke and McCarty speculate that the poorer-quality materials were used as a cost-cutting exercise.
Another aspect of the Titanic disaster that would have been known from the time the ship hit the iceberg was that if more than four of the 16 watertight compartments into which the interior space of the Titanic was divided were flooded, the ship could not stay afloat.
The Titanic‘s designer Thomas Andrews was on board at the time and was asked by Capt. Smith to accompany him to assess the damage immediately after the collision. The impact had been on the for’ard starboard side below the water line and once Andrews had discovered the extent of the damage he warned Smith that since more than four compartments had been ruptured (in fact six had been breached) “it was a mathematical certainty that the ship would sink“.
View of the bow of the RMS Titanic photographed in June 2004 by the ROV Hercules.Courtesy of NOAA/Institute for Exploration/University of Rhode Island (NOAA/IFE/URI).
A chain of events
As well as the actual make-up of the ship, it also appears that the climate thousands of miles away from where the ship actually sunk may have had a hand in events. At times when the weather is warmer than usual in the Caribbean, the Gulf Stream intersects with the glacier-carrying Labrador Current in the North Atlantic in such a way that icebergs become aligned to form a barrier of ice.
In 1912 the Caribbean experienced an unusually hot summer and so the Gulf Stream was particularly intense; the Titanic hit the iceberg right at the intersection of the Gulf Stream and the Labrador Current.
“No one thing sent the Titanic to the bottom of the North Atlantic. Rather, the ship was ensnared by a perfect storm of circumstances that conspired her to doom,” Corfield concludes.
At the end, the disaster was a cascading sequence of events, from design through construction to operation, followed by chances and climatic variances – the end result though was the loss of the unsinkable Titanic along with 1,490 of the 2,358 passengers and crew.
Source: AlphaGalileo
More information:
- Full article appears in April 2012 issue of Physics World and online in physicsworld.com, website of the Institute of Physics.
- Richard Corfield website
- RMS Titanic website
- T. Foecke, J. McCarty, (2008) What Really Sank the Titanic: New Forensic Discoveries (Citadel)