Titanic (6 page)

A third theory suggested that
Titanic'
s structure suffered from overall weakness due to unexpected engineering problems. One line of inquiry centered on
Titanic'
s twin,
Olympic
. If
Olympic
suffered structural weakness,
Titanic
likely did too.

Off the Irish coast in 1911, Harland & Wolff chief designer Thomas Andrews stepped onto
Olympic'
s bridge wing during a sea test and felt the deck ripple. Curious, Andrews stuck his head over the
side rail.
Olympic
gasped like a greyhound, its hull moving three inches in and out. “Sides panting at cruising speed,” he jotted in his notebook.

Big ships conceived during that era presented big design questions never raised before, such as: What's the minimum steel strength needed for a ship more than 882 feet long? Andrews had asked for hull plates 1¼ inches thick, but Harland & Wolff insisted on just 1 inch to make
Titanic
go faster. In response to
Olympic'
s trials, Andrews reinforced
Titanic
with steel bracing in its bow and at the juncture of hull and double bottom. He enclosed the Promenade Deck. Modern investigators wondered if it was enough, prompting a second line of inquiry: Did more changes in ship design follow the
Titanic
disaster?

Divers to
Britannic
,
Titanic'
s second sister (originally named
Gigantic
), which sank in World War I near Greece, discovered expansion joint upgrades evidently put in place after
Titanic
sank. Expansion joints reduce stress by letting components of large structures move. In sidewalks and bridges, such joints are built-in gaps that accommodate expansion and contraction in heat and cold; in large ships they exist as narrow, open spaces in the upper portions of the hull and decks that allow them to flex atop ocean waves without cracking,

Naval architect Roger Long examined images of steel torn from the hull near
Titanic'
s aft expansion joint, and added data about
Britannic
‘s redesign. He concluded in 2005 that despite Andrews's improvements,
Titanic'
s hull remained weak, especially at the expansion joints. Skeptics pointed out expansion joints extended only through the top two decks, limiting their structural impact. Rather than the single key to
Titanic'
s demise, the joints might have just been one of many—the straw that broke the camel's back.

A recent theory centers on simple human error. In 2010, the granddaughter of Second Officer Charles Lightoller—the highest
ranking surviving officer of the
Titanic
—published a family secret:
Titanic
, she said, had its fatal collision because of confusion over which way to turn the ship's wheel. Louise Patten's 2010 novel
Good as Gold
focused on this explosive secret, which covered up the confusion resulting from two conflicting sets of steering orders. For centuries, sailors executed Tiller Orders, named for the horizontal attachment to the top of the rudder. Ordered to turn left, the helmsman pushed the tiller to the right. That swung the rudder to the left, where its drag caused the bow to move left. As ships moved from sail to steam, new steering mechanisms led to Rudder Orders, in which the pilot rotated a wheel to the left to go left, as a driver would turn a car. In 1912, Patten said, North Atlantic ships operated schizophrenically between the two. Some officers learned under one system and sailed under another. The crew of the
Titanic
was still operating under Tiller Orders.

When First Officer William Murdoch barked “Hard a-starboard” to avoid the iceberg, he used Tiller Orders to mean he wanted Quartermaster Robert Hichens to turn the wheel right, to steer left. According to the Lightoller family account, Hichens, who was trained under Rudder Orders, panicked, momentarily forgot that they were sailing under Tiller Orders, and turned the wrong way—toward the ice. Lightoller hid those facts to save the White Star Line's reputation, Patten said.

Hichens's great-granddaughter, Sally Neillson, replied to the British press that the quartermaster had many years' experience, including several shifts at
Titanic'
s helm in the days before April 14. He never would have made such a basic error, she said. In addition, the British and American inquiries into the sinking established that Sixth Officer James Moody verified the proper execution of Murdoch's orders.

The study of
Titanic
and why it sank has remained hit-and-miss. Pieces brought to the surface have yielded clues, but their usefulness
has been muted by the lack of a comprehensive study. Scientists long clamored for a systematic archaeological observation and research expedition to the wreck site.

Until 2010, nobody brought together the finances, technology, and know-how to pull it off. That year, a scientific expedition coalesced around a plan put forward by RMS Titanic, Inc. to create a detailed, accurate, comprehensive map of the shipwreck site. It would fix upon its grid every known
Titanic
artifact, whether in situ or already recovered. Top-quality images of the bow, stern, and artifact field would augment the map. Together the data would form an archaeological geographic information system, or GIS.

“Simply stated, we ultimately want to understand the process of
Titanic
going from ship and floating community to scattered and broken artifacts on the seabed,” said James Delgado, principal investigator of the expedition and director of the Maritime Heritage Program at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

Besides NOAA, the exploration team included representatives of Woods Hole, the National Park Service, the Institute of Nautical Archaeology, an imaging team at Michigan State University, and the Waitt Institute, which provided the best deep-sea exploration vehicles.

The team set sail from St. John's, Newfoundland, on
Jean Charcot
, a ship used by explorer Jacques Cousteau. The ship arrived at the
Titanic
site in late August 2010. Having examined data from previous expeditions, the science crew began by choosing a rectangle measuring three miles east to west and five miles north to south for an initial inspection of the site with autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) using acoustic sensors.

Owned by the Waitt Institute and developed and operated by Woods Hole, the AUVs look like 13-foot yellow torpedoes. Woods Hole calls them REMUS vehicles, short for Remote Environmental
Monitoring Units. They were rechristened
Ginger
and
Mary Ann
for the Hollywood starlet and farm girl characters of the 1960s television sitcom
Gilligan's Island
.

The two REMUS vehicles were designed to follow programmed instructions instead of needing humans to monitor and drive them like cars.
Mary Ann
splashed in first to mow the lawn east-west over the site.
Ginger
followed, moving north-south. To make their initial map, they emitted side-scan sonar signals that bounced off objects 600 meters distant or more. Their sound waves moved much more efficiently than light through the water, making them ideal for subsurface mapping. Echoes translated into shapes. When finished, they surfaced. The crew fished them out of the water to download and analyze their data. The AUVs then got new missions.

Scientists joked the two had different personalities. “
Ginger
is much higher maintenance,” Woods Hole's Brennan Phillips told a video crew on the expedition.

The expedition also photographed the site using a remotely operated optical scanner, a Phoenix Remora 6000. It came standard with a small, two-dimensional utility camera. To do a full optical survey of
Titanic
, the Remora had to be retrofitted with high-definition, two- and three-dimensional cameras.

The yellow-topped Remora, which looks like a big cube of just over a meter per side, took two hours to complete a thruster-powered descent to the ocean floor. Once there, its camera system shot digital still images at 30 to 60 frames per second; still and motion three-dimensional images, and on-demand single images at resolutions incomprehensible a few years earlier. All fed their data into a central bank, which recorded multiple images simultaneously and time-stamped them for matching with navigation data. The technology brought 3-D images of handrails, portholes, and a boat crane into clear focus, seemingly close enough to touch.

Key to capturing clear images was bright light. An artificial sun
rose on
Titanic
when the Remora's illumination, supplied by Deep Sea Power & Light, bathed it in the equivalent of 120,000 lumens.

Aside from a delay caused by hurricane warnings, the mapping project worked well.
Mary Ann, Ginger
, and the Remora collected more data than human eyes could gather through tiny submersible windows.

The imaging equipment picked up objects as small as coins. Some images showed things undetected by previous expeditions. Others depicted artifacts that might have been ejected from the hull during descent or impact. Geologic features, such as the curves, hills, and valleys of the seafloor, gave the clearest picture yet of topography.

The scientists on the 2010 expedition were cautious about hasty judgments, but they were delighted by the quality of what they had seen.

“We probably know more about this site than any piece of ocean floor, but we still don't know an awful lot,” said Delgado. “We're still sorting all of it out.”

Expedition participants will know even more when they populate their map with oceanographic and other scientific data, they told a federal court in 2011. (The court hearing at the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia was to provide an update on RMS Titanic, Inc.'s role as salvor-in-possession of Titanic. RMS Titanic, Inc. also used the opportunity to outline its vision for adopting an expanded role of trustee to increase scientific knowledge and educational awareness of the ship.) They expect to pinpoint every artifact still at the site, and fix the position of every artifact removed by previous expeditions. For example, an asparagus pot retrieved by RMS Titanic, Inc. in 2004 would get its own map coordinates, along with images and historical data available through the click of a mouse.

When the final map is complete, expedition participants hope it creates a “virtual”
Titanic
for scientists and nonscientists alike to
study.

In late 2011, as artifacts began to dot the map, scientists began to get a clearer picture of how every item came to rest on the ocean floor. The stern and its debris field particularly intrigued them. Previous visits had only haphazardly documented the stern, which is not only less visually appealing than the bow but also dangerous for submersibles to approach because of a rat's nest of fallen cables and cranes that could ensnare the unwary.

“No one had really gone into that area since 1986,” Woods Hole imaging expert William Lange told the federal court.

Lange said the map doesn't represent the classic narrative of how a ship breaks apart and sinks, in which “the heavy pieces are at one end and the lighter pieces at the other, and it is a gradual comet trail type of debris trail.” Instead, he said, the images present a much more complicated pattern.

That pattern may hold the key to learning how
Titanic
really sank. It may lead to greater understanding of other important shipwrecks.

The completed map also will serve as a baseline for tracking changes at the site as the shipwreck slowly deteriorates from microorganisms consuming its hull and deck plates. And that will help experts care for the site as an archaeological treasure, ensuring that the wreck of
Titanic
receives proper management for many years to come.

Dr. Michael S. Sweeney
is a professor at Ohio University's E.W. Scripps School of Journalism, where he serves as director of the graduate program and teaches print journalism courses.

He has written a variety of books for National Geographic Books, including
God Grew Tired of Us, Brain: The Complete Mind
, and
BrainWorks
. He also has published academically on the history of wartime journalism, and particularly on the methods and effectiveness of censorship in wartime. His first book,
Secrets of Victory
, about the American Office of Censorship in World War II, was named book of the year for 2001 by the American Journalism Historians Association.

He is associate editor of
Journalism History
, a quarterly academic journal published at the Scripps School.

Dr. Sweeney received his bachelor's degree from the University of Nebraska, his master's from the University of North Texas, and his Ph.D. from Ohio University.

He lives in Athens, Ohio, with his wife, Carolyn.

(Author photo by Carolyn Sweeney)