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An aurora that lit up the sky over the Titanic might explain why it sank:
Glowing auroras shimmered in skies over the northern Atlantic Ocean on April 15, 1912 — the night the RMS Titanic sank. Now, new research hints that the geomagnetic storm behind the northern lights could have disrupted the ship's navigation and communication systems and hindered rescue efforts, fueling the disaster that killed more than 1,500 passengers.
Eyewitnesses described aurora glows in the region as the Titanic went down, with one observer testifying that "the northern lights were very strong that night," Mila Zinkova, an independent weather researcher and photographer, reported in a new study, published online Aug. 4 in the journal Weather.
[...] Auroras form from solar storms, when the sun expels high-speed streams of electrified gas that hurtle toward Earth. As the charged particles and energy collide with Earth's atmosphere, some travel down magnetic field lines to interact with atmospheric gases, glowing green, red, purple and blue, NASA says. These charged particles can also interfere with electrical and magnetic signals, causing surges and oscillations, according to NASA.
[...] And the northern lights were highly visible when the Titanic sank.
[...] At the same time that the solar storm's charged particles were generating a pretty light show, they could also have been tugging at the Titanic's compass. A deviation of only 0.5 degrees would have been enough to steer the ship away from safety and place it on its fatal collision course toward an iceberg, Zinkova said in the study.
"This apparently insignificant error could have made the difference between colliding with the iceberg and avoiding it," she wrote.
[...] Radio signals that night were also "freaky," operators on the ocean liner RMS Baltic reported (the Baltic was one of the ships that responded to the Titanic's distress call, but the RMS Carpathia got there first, according to the Armstrong Browning Library at Baylor University in Waco, Texas). SOS signals sent by the Titanic to nearby ships went unheard, and responses to the Titanic were never received, according to Zinkova.
Journal Reference:
Mila Zinkova. RMetS Journals, Weather (DOI: 10.1002/wea.3817)
(Score: 4, Interesting) by deadstick on Monday September 28 2020, @03:00AM (1 child)
The part about interference with communication may hold some water, but the notion of a compass error causing the collision is ludicrous. You can't navigate around a hazard if you don't know where it is, and even if you did know, you'd be a bloody fool to trust a magnetic compass heading to 0.5 degree precision.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Freeman on Monday September 28 2020, @04:33PM
The idea, isn't that a compass error of 0.5 degrees would have helped or hindered "emergency" maneuvering to avoid the iceberg. Rather, that the 0.5 degrees of compass error put it on the course to hit the iceberg. Thus, if it's heading had been different by 0.5 degrees, it could have sailed on and never even seen the iceberg. Then again, maybe it would have just hit another iceberg.
The problem the Titanic had was hubris. The belief that the boat couldn't sink. Which lead to poor design decisions regarding life boats and very likely contributed to it's impact with an iceberg.
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"