Thermal mirage ‘hid’ Titanic iceberg
The sky above the Titanic on the night it sank into the icy waters of the north Atlantic was one of the most beautiful the survivors had seen. According to one passenger fortunate enough to secure a place on a lifeboat, the “keen atmosphere, free from any haze” made the stars “twinkle and glitter with a staccato flash that made the sky seem nothing but a setting made for them in which to display their wonder”.
The crew saw something altogether different – the horizon was obscured by a haze that prevented them spotting an iceberg in their path until it was too late.
Freshly examined evidence of this discrepancy found in The Times’ archive is now bolstering a theory that suggests the Titanic was the victim of a freak weather event, which both caused the collision with the iceberg and hampered rescue efforts.
Tim Maltin, a historian and broadcaster, believes the crew of the Titanic and nearby shipping vessels witnessed a “thermal inversion”, a meteorological event in which a band of cold air forces its way beneath warmer air.
He argues that on April 14, 1912, cold air driven by the Labrador current pushed beneath warm air carried by the Gulf Stream. The
effect is a mirage. Light bends over the horizon, allowing observers to see greater distances. Above the true horizon they see a refracted image of the sea beyond. This can trick them into thinking that objects on the true horizon are nearer than they are. Observers at a higher altitude, such as the crow’s nest of a ship, may see the gap between the true horizon and the refracted one as a haze.
Maltin found reports of light refraction mentioned in the logs of several ships in the area at the time and descriptions of “a haze” from the Titanic crew.
Maltin said the report in The Times was a clear description of thermal inversion. Lookouts, who described the iceberg as looking dark, missed the hazard because it was poorly defined against the haze behind it. “The reason why the berg appeared to be dark was because they were seeing it against a lighter haze,” he said.
The false horizon not only hindered the crew from spotting the iceberg, but sowed confusion among those who might have come to the rescue.
Although the Titanic was doomed from the moment it hit the iceberg, the catastrophic loss of life might have been averted if the SS Californian, sailing nearby, had come to its aid. Maltin said the crew of that ship saw the Titanic with a false horizon behind it and concluded they were looking not at a big ship in the distance but a small ship closer by.
Had they correctly identified the Titanic, they might have woken their wireless operator to exchange messages with it and discover that it was in distress. Instead, they assumed that the unidentified vessel carried no such equipment and that it would be better to make contact with their powerful Morse lamp. They tried this with no response. Maltin argues the two ships were unable to read one another’s Morse signals because the atmospheric distortions “effectively scrambled” them.
The Titanic, which struck the iceberg at 11.40pm, slipped beneath the waves about 2.20am on April 15, 1912. Of the 2240 passengers and crew who set sail on it, more than 1500 died in the disaster.