Titanic01:52 Apr 12 2012
Times Read: 643
The other night I was watching the National Geographic channel, it had a two hour Titanic special with James Cameron, the director of the movie Titanic. He's become something of a Titanic buff, diving to the wreck many times, and doing books and specials about it.
This time, he had assembled a team of experts...from the head of the Titanic Historical Society to naval specialists and everyone in between, to try and trace back what happened to the ship after it hit the iceberg. Specifically, what happened to the stern, the last bit that went in the water, where all the people were gathered at the last. Why did that sustain much more damage than the bow?
After two hours and much discussion, computer models and charts and diagrams, answers were formed. But hey, Mr Cameron, the anwers you and your team came up with were the same answers put forth by Robert Ballard, who discovered the wreck of the ship in 1985. Had you bothered to watch any of Ballard's dvds or even look up some old footage on youtube, you could have saved yourself some time, trouble and money.
The bow (front end of the ship) filled up with water first because that's where it was damaged first. That section pulled the rest of the ship down and eventually broke it in two. The bow went down and settled on the bottom of the ocean, 2 1/2 miles down. The bow did sustain some damage on the way down and when it hit bottom, but nothing like the stern.
The stern looks like a bomb went off on it. Whole decks are collapsed, most of it is crushed. It took Mr Cameron all this time to work out the obvious....when the stern finally went into the water, not all of it was full of water, so as it descended, it was not pressure compensated, and it blew apart. Damage was also done to it from the water that surrounded the stern as it dropped...the ship stopped on the bottom, but the force of the water coming down with it didn't.
Honest to geez, it made me laugh to watch these learned guys scratching their heads trying to figure out what the hell happened to that ship on the way down. They must not have watched anyone else's documentaries or read any books, because it's all there.
Well, anyway, it was entertaining. And if you fancy going down to the wreck yourself, save your pennies, kids. For $40,000 a Russian company ferries people down and back. They said people have even got married down there.
The 100th aniversary of the actual sinking is this Saturday night.
COMMENTS
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RedQueen
04:15 Apr 14 2012
I find it hard to believe that Yahoo actually ran an article about how some people these days didn't even know Titanic was anything more than a movie- They're probably married to the same people who think the lunar landing was filmed in a studio....
NLW
22:05 Apr 17 2012
My grandmother was four when it happened. Fortunately, she wasn't on that ship, but it makes me think that 100 years isn't really that long ago.