Hai there! So I researched about "why did the Titanic hit the ice berg?" and I saw a millions of informations about it. But I saw this one website and it's called 'Smithsonian.com' and they showed an article about "Did the Titanic sink because of an optical illusion?". It caught my attention for the first and now I'm going to share it to you. It's shows that new research may have found the reason why the ship hit an iceberg and that is light refraction.
According to a new research by British historian Tim Maltin, there's an unusual phenomenon mentions that why the Titanic hit and iceberg and received no any assistance from a nearby ship. Maltin found that atmospheric conditions in the area that night were ripe for super refraction. And he discovered that the extraordinary bending of light causes miraging and it was recorded by several ships in the area. He says it also prevented the Titanic’s lookouts from seeing the iceberg in time and the freighter Californian from identifying the ocean liner and communicating with it. In the year of 1992, British government investigation recommended that super refraction may have played role in the calamity,but that possibility went unexplored until Maltin mined weather records, survivors’ testimony and long-forgotten ships’ logs.
From the left, the image shows that the Titanic was sailing from Gulf Stream waters into the frigid Labrador Current, where the air column was cooling from the bottom up which is creating layers of cold air below layers of warmer air and this is called as 'thermal inversion'. The high air pressure kept the air free of fog.
At the middle, the image says that the thermal invension refracts light abnormally and can create a 'superior mirage'. Superior mirage means an object appears higher and nearer than it actually is before a false horizon. The area between the false horizon and the true one may appear as haze.
And the third image which is the right one shows the false horizon and actual horizon. From the image, it is mentions that the Californian’s radio operator warned the Titanic of ice, but the night provided little bit contrast and the sea seemed calm the line between true and false horizon, and it's camouflaging the iceberg. A Titanic lookout sounded the alarm when the iceberg was about a mile away and it was too late.
From the left again, the image mentions that before the collision happened, the Titanic sailed into the Californian's view, but it appeared too near and small to be the great ocean linear. The Californian captain named Stanley Lord knew the Titanic was the only other ship in the area with a radio, and so concluded this ship did not have one.
The middle image says that The Californian captain, Stanley Lord said repeatedly had someone signal the ship by Morse lamp “and she did not take the slightest notice of it.” The Titanic, now in trouble, signaled the Californian by Morse lamp, also to no avail. The abnormally stratified air was distorting and disrupting the signals.
And the last image says that the Titanic fired distress rockets some 600 feet into the air but the rockets appeared to be much lower relatives to the ship. Those Californian ships, unsure of what they saw, and ignored the signals. When the Titanic sank at 2:20 a.m. on April 15th, they thought the ship might be simply sailing away.
