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Yithian

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Aurora Borealis May Have Contributed to Sinking of Titanic, Suggests Meteorological Researcher
Erika P.Sep 17, 2020 07:40 AM EDT

On that fateful night of April 15, 1912, the seemingly unsinkable RMS Titanic hit an iceberg and sunk for hours, killing over a thousand passengers.

More than a century later, a new study proposes that the RMS Titanic was slightly thrown off course by the Northern lights present during that night. According to a U.S.-based meteorological researcher, the Titanic's last night of sailing at the Atlantic ocean was illuminated by the aurora borealis.

The researcher based her study on the accounts of the eyewitness during that night and argues that the geomagnetic storm might have been large enough to affect the navigation system of the Titanic to a small but significant degree.

She believes that the interference might have disrupted the wireless transmission between the Titanic and other nearby vessels, which blocked the distress calls and messages from the sinking ship. However, the magnetic disruption may have also offset the error by accidentally sending the Titanic's broadcast position to another vessel, which leads it to the correct location of the titanic's lifeboats.


Article Continues:
https://www.sciencetimes.com/articl...e-rms-titanic-sinking-revealed-researcher.htm
 
That's interesting ... The presence of the aurora borealis that night is commonly mentioned, but I don't recall anyone suggesting it may have been associated with geomagnetic interference.

I can recall only one other suggested scenario involving the aurora (if only indirectly) - the one in which its illumination contributed to conditions very conducive to mirage effects. Such effects were reported by multiple other ships in the area during the fatal night and the next morning. This scenario suggests it was visibility problems (if not extant mirages) rather than compass disorientation that contributed to the disaster.

https://timmaltin.com/2015/12/16/superior-mirage-titanic/

NOTE: If nothing else this webpage provides details about the huge ice field Titanic encountered. It wasn't a matter of one ship / one lone iceberg as is often presumed or pictured.
 
If you compare the Titanic's course with the location of the wreck, she was almost perfectly on track. Alright, the wreck is two miles south but it's close enough, especially when you consider she'd been in a southerly current for a few hours.
A few survivors did report seeing the Aurora but it was on the horizon: this implies a K planetary index value of 7: reasonably high, but not wonderfully so.
Any solar storm might have affected ship's wirelesses - and there is evidence that this is the case. Nearby ship's sometimes didn't hear a thing from the Titanic but further away vessels did. There's even a story that an amateur radio operator in Wales picked up the distress calls. Obviously there's some debate about that!

But yes, a massive icefield stretched across the Titanic's path. If she hadn't hit the iceberg, she would have encountered the field within 15 minutes. Whether the field would have sunk the ship is debatable - probably not, I think.
Needless to say, more details can be found on my own Titanic pages.
 
If you compare the Titanic's course with the location of the wreck, she was almost perfectly on track. Alright, the wreck is two miles south but it's close enough, especially when you consider she'd been in a southerly current for a few hours.
A few survivors did report seeing the Aurora but it was on the horizon: this implies a K planetary index value of 7: reasonably high, but not wonderfully so.
Any solar storm might have affected ship's wirelesses - and there is evidence that this is the case. Nearby ship's sometimes didn't hear a thing from the Titanic but further away vessels did. There's even a story that an amateur radio operator in Wales picked up the distress calls. Obviously there's some debate about that!

But yes, a massive icefield stretched across the Titanic's path. If she hadn't hit the iceberg, she would have encountered the field within 15 minutes. Whether the field would have sunk the ship is debatable - probably not, I think.
Needless to say, more details can be found on my own Titanic pages.
The evidence is that the Titanic would not have sunk if it had hit ice straight on. The culminating mistake of the disaster was to try and 'swerve' past the berg. Many contributing factors but that was the fatal one.
 
From History Channel programs, the Titanic was doomed before it left port.

There was an uncontrolled coal fire in the coal bunker that weakened metal plates before it started to sail.

The captain was arrogant !
Coal bunker fire. Maybe - a very common thing at the time. Unlikely to have affected the plates as wouldn't have burned hot enough.

Arrogant captain -so what? Even if he was he wasn't on the bridge when the accident happened.

While we are at it - they were not speeding to gain the Blue Riband, the ship was actually well designed, and no-one ignored any radio messages.
An enormous amount of twaddle gets written about this.
 
Again Cochise, I only know from TV programs.

History Channel claims other ships in the area were sending out Iceberg warnings, but the Captain wanted full speed at this night when it struck the Iceberg.

If true, it does not sound intelligent.

Only 10% of an Iceberg is above the water line.
 
The article is not only appallingly written, but seems to be twaddle.

Blaming the collision on the Titanic being marginally off course falsely implies that the location of the iceberg was known precisely and that the correct course was calculated to miss it. Must have been all that 1912 satellite tracking of icebergs...

The reference to the "navigation system" being affected is strange. Navigation in those days was by magnetic compass, chronometer, sextant, log, and dead reckoning. Of these, only the compass could possibly be affected by a magnetic storm and in a massive iron ship, there would be plenty of other distractions for the compass.

Until the days of LORAN, then Decca navigation, and later GPS, the position of a ship in the open ocean was never more than an estimate.

A traditional mariner's magnetic compass has a 32 point rose, with the points being 360/32 = 11.25 degrees apart. By modern standards, that's pretty crude. Even working on 64 points, you would only have accuracy to 5.625 degrees.

However, I was pleased to learn from the article that "all 705 of the survivors were rescued". Hitherto, I had always assumed that many of them had swum ashore over the following few weeks.
 
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Unfortunately, the proponent of the theory that the Titanic was unseaworthy due to the coal fire has been shown on MANY occasions to be a notorious cherry picker of evidence but to also suppress data that runs counter to his thesis.

On another point, yes, the Titanic did receive multiple ice warnings and paid them little heed. Off hand, I think about six ships sent warnings. If you want to know more, I compiled the evidence in an essay
www.paullee.com/titanic/icewarnings.php
 
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