In 2005, an expedition team to Titanic discovered two complete pieces of the hull. Both are complete sections of double-bottom hull from keel to keel, from the starboard to the port side. The entire backbone of the ship lying inert upon the bottom of the ocean to the east of the stern and bow.
The efforts of an artist making sketches of these two pieces reveals that they are not only two pieces of the hull, but the very section where the breakup occurred. These are the pieces of the bow and the stern where they separated and went on two lonely journey's to the bottom of the ocean.
The members of the expedition theorize that instead of the break going straight from the top of the ship to the bottom, it went only down to the hull. There, water leaking into the ship pulled the separated pieces back together, causing the ship to bend the other direction. This reason is why the hull of the ship at the break is relatively clean but the upper sections of the stern and bow sections are both mangled.
Alas, despite this new information, the Titanic is still wasting away. Soon all that will remain are artifacts, the huge bronze propeller blades, the bronze frame where the wheel once rested on the swept away bridge on the bow, and memories of the ill-fated vessel. The rest will simply be a shapeless mass of iron-ore on the ocean's bottom and a piece of history will be lost forever.
12,600 feet down (2 1/2 miles) beneath the ocean surface lies on of the greatest ocean liner's of all time: the Royal Mail Steamer, the Titanic. She was 885 feet long (the length of an 80-story building) and nearly 100 feet tall with three huge propeller blades. At sailing she carried more than 2,000 aboard and took more than a thousand of those down with her on the night of April 14, 1912 and the morning of April 15 - the night that she struck the iceberg that crippled her forever and the morning in whish she sank beneath the ocean's surface forever.
First Officer Murdoch was on watch that fateful night but he was not the first to see the iceberg. Edward Fleet and his comrade in the crow's nest were first to see it - a dark shape looming up out of the dark in front of them: an iceberg, a black berg as it is called. A black berg is an iceberg that has literally turned upside down, showing nothing but crystal-like ice above the water, not the powdery snow that you would except. This makes it almost invisible and a high threat to a ship on the open sea.
Fleet rang the bell in the crow's nest three times and yelled, "Iceberg dead ahead, sir!" Murdoch gave the order that may very well have led to the ship's demise - "Hard to starboard! Reverse the engines!" The bow did turn but it was not enough. The iceberg hit along the port (right) side, popping the rivets that held the ship together and allowing water to pour in. "Hard to port!" yelled Murdoch, trying to fish tail around the iceberg. But by then it was far too late. The berg had sliced into the ship. Murdoch then yelled, "Close all watertight doors!"
Passengers simply watched as the iceberg slowly floated by, unaware of the peril they were now in.
Captain Smith arrived on desk sometime later, asking for what was going on. "An iceberg, sir. I turned to starboard then tried to port round her but she hit." "Close all watertight doors," was Smith's order. Murdoch replied, "The doors are closed, sir."
Captain Smith then sent Fourth Officer Boxhall to check the damage below deck. Unfortunately, Boxhall didn't go down far enough and reported everything was okay. Very soon there were reports such as "The mail hold's flooding," which sent Boxhall hurrying below deck. Men were shoving letters into bags as one floated by Boxhall. That was when he knew that the damage was very serious.
After the damage was discovered, passengers were told to go to the main deck to board the lifeboats. First Officer Lightoller was one of the many officers who was loaded the lifeboats. Very few passengers (only women and children) went into the first boats as they could not believe that the ship was sinking as the lights were still on and because it was obvious the Titanic was unsinkable because of her watertight doors. Unfortunately the doors only went up to C deck and the water just spilled over the top of each compartment into the next.
Because of so few not being willing to leave the ship, the lifeboats were not filled to capacity. If they had been filled, many more lives would have been saved that night.
The passengers still on the ship after the lifeboats were launched hurried to the stern. Those in the boats waited, silent as they watched the chaos. The ship suddenly began to break near one of her expansion joints, splitting right down to the keel. Sparks flew up as metal and wood peeled back then broke as the bow was dragged down into the water, pulling the stern with it.
The stern dropped back down into the water before it began to rise up again. Then it began to sink, going lower and lower until the back of the ship and the massive propellers sank beneath the freezing water.
As the bow and stern sank they were, unlike earlier telling's of a complete separation, still connected by the keel - the backbone of the ship - which kept them together. Since it was the first part ever laid when construction began, it was the strongest part - the last line of defense of a sort. But somewhere along the way the keel did give out and shattered, falling away on it's own. Leaving the bow and stern to begin their long and very different journey's.
The bow fell towards the ocean floor as 22 knots after the keel separated it from the stern. It supposedly fell with a sea-sawing motion: diving, stalling, diving again, stalling, and continued in this pattern until it hit the ocean floor. The starboard (left) side of the ship exploded outward in a 90-degree angle as the bow hit the muddy bottom. Air burst out of the port side at the same time, forming a large hole near the mud line.
The stern had a much different journey than the bow. While all of the compartments in the bow were already flooded, air was still trapped in the stern. This air forced its way up, going through anything in its path. It destroyed the Third Class Stairwell in this fashion. Then it imploded, exploding not a moment later, causing the poop deck to be peeled back to reveal the metal rib cage below the decking.
Some scientists think that the Titanic has only ninety more years before the rusticles growing on her hull eat the metal away. She will then collapse into herself, becoming an iron-ore deposit on the ocean floor. And we have probably not yet discovered all of her secrets - most but not all. Therefore we must learn all that we can before one of the world's greatest and most famous liner's disappears...
"There was peace, in a world that hadn't even tended to its way. It seems to me that the disaster about to occur was the event that not only made the world open its eyes and awake, but woke it with a start. To my mind, the world of today awoke April 15, 1912."
Jack Thayer, Titanic Survivor
Titanic circa 1912 :: Titanic bow now :: The Grand Staircase
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