Iceberg that sank the Titanic

The iceberg is a counterpart to the luxurious ship, standing for the cold and silent force of nature that cost the lives of so many people.

Olson, Doescher, and Sinnott suspect the origin of the fatal iceberg in the Jakobshavn Glacier near Disko Bay on Greenland's west coast.

The warm and wet year 1908 created the conditions for a huge iceberg to travel in the early autumn of 1911 near southwest Greenland.

This would have traveled west towards Canada and been transported south by the Labrador Current – along the Canadian coast including Newfoundland, the so-called Iceberg Alley.

On 13 April, a depression over Greenland with cold polar air and winds from the northwest drove icebergs south into the shipping lanes.

[5] However, considering that the iceberg may have been three years old at the time of the collision, it probably existed for only a week or two after the April 1912 accident, because it may soon have reached the warmer waters of the Gulf Stream.

[6] Captain Edward Smith and his officers knew before they left Southampton that the drift ice field was larger in extent and more southerly than in previous years.

In addition, several radio reports ("marconigrams") were received from other ships during the voyage, warning the Titanic of drifting ice fields and icebergs.

The incident with the Baltic marconigram fueled suspicions that Ismay had exerted undue influence on the captain to keep the Titanic from slowing down despite ice warnings.

With the Titanic wireless set having broken down, he had spent the whole night repairing it and now had a window of only two hours in which to reach Cape Race.

As requested by Captain Stanley Lord, Evans wanted to inform the Titanic that the Californian was surrounded by ice and had stopped for the night.

The radio operators, who were not employees of the shipping line by contracted by the Marconi Company, were not familiar with navigation and could not assess the significance of a message in terms of content.

After the two men in the Titanic's crow's nest sighted the iceberg, one of them, Frederick Fleet, sounded the bell three times to signal that he had seen an object straight ahead of the ship.

This manoeuvre, ordered by the First Officer William M. Murdoch, probably prevented the Titanic from shearing off with its stern and touching the iceberg again.

[19] Other surviving crew members had their own accounts of the iceberg: Soon after the collision, Captain Smith and several officers had rushed to the bridge.

[35] For size comparison, the Titanic, the largest ship in the world at the time, had a total length of 882 feet and 9 inches (around 269 metres).

Attempts have been made to match the shape of the icebergs in question with the descriptions, and in some cases a line of red paint (from the hull of the ship) was said to have been seen.

[42] Bigg and Wilton see the estimated size proportions of the iceberg reflected in the one photographed by Captain de Carteret.

[34] A story has developed around the historic disaster of the passenger liner Titanic with which certain elements are inextricably linked, say Brown, McDonagh and Shultz.

[46][47] As a product of a Belfast shipyard, the Titanic could also be seen as a symbol of Protestant pride – which was in danger of being sunk by the cool "iceberg dynamics" of Irish nationalism.

[52] As early as 1912, the British poet Thomas Hardy poetically processed the relationship between the ship and the iceberg,[53] in a highly unusual way that defies all expectations.

[54] In the much-cited poem The Convergence of the Twain, there is neither suffering nor death; instead, a blind, senseless will is at work, which, in the sense of Schopenhauer, has replaced the personal God of the Bible as a deity.

Rather, it goes back to the Greek comedy writer Aristophanes: the gods divided the originally spherical human being into two parts as punishment, and hence comes his urge to unite in the sexual act.

Man and woman, for example, appear in it as no longer twain, but one flesh, and the creature of cleaving wing (in the King James translation) also refers to this.

[58] Hardy, an otherwise sympathetic author who lost two friends on the Titanic,[59] did not write the poem at a great distance from the disaster, for the first manuscript is dated 24 April 1912 (nine days after the sinking).

On 14 May, a matinée was held at Covent Garden in London to raise money for the bereaved, and Hardy wrote The Convergence of the Twain for the occasion.

In a song by the Dixon Brothers (1938), a band of cotton mill workers from South Carolina, the iceberg not only slashes the side of the ship but also cuts off the Titanic's pride.

[63] The American comedy format Saturday Night Live had Bowen Yang appear as "The Iceberg that sank the Titanic" in 2021.

In the museum in Pigeon Forge there is a large touchable ice installation (4.6 by 8.5 metres) meant to make the coldness of an iceberg tangible.

Lorraine McGrath from the tourism promotion board of the city of St. John's in Newfoundland talks about the fascination that icebergs exert on those who see one for the first time.

The iceberg photographed on the morning of 15 April by the chief steward of the Prinz Adalbert who, before even learning of the collision, noticed a red smear along the iceberg's base
'Iceberg' at the Titanic Museum in Branson , Missouri, whose building is modeled on the famous ship
Greenland with the Jakobshavn Glacier (white oblong area at the bottom of the picture)
The Titanic 's route across the North Atlantic , with location of the wreck
The Titanic as she leaves the Irish port of Queenstown on 11 April 1912. This was the last stop before the voyage into the North Atlantic.
The Marconigram of the Amerika , which came to the Hydrographic Office in Washington via the Titanic and Cape Race . It reported two icebergs seen by the ship at a certain spot on 14 April.
Titanic : Ice warnings on 14 April 1912. Only part of this was known to Captain Smith.
The possible visibility as the Titanic approached the iceberg (the ship seen from the front)
What the evasive manoeuvre may have looked like: the Titanic , coming from the east (on the right in the picture), first goes to the left and then to the right, so that the stern, which is swinging out, does not hit the iceberg. (Bow in blue, stern in red.)
At the Titanic Museum Branson: a model of one of those icebergs captured in a photograph near the site of the disaster.
From Le Petit Journal , Paris , 28 April 1912: the very earliest depictions of the disaster are fantasy drawings with no knowledge of the size of the iceberg or the nature of the collision.
A 15 April 1912 drawing based on 17-year old survivor Jack Thayer 's description of the sinking, drawn by L. P. Skidmore on the rescue ship Carpathia .
The iceberg and the Titanic in a 1913 painting by Harry J. Jansen
Comparison of iceberg and ship, according to Bigg and Wilton's estimate of the iceberg. The appearance of the iceberg must remain speculative.
The iceberg photographed from Birma
Captain W. F. Wood of the Etonian photographed the iceberg on 12 April, two days before it struck the Titanic
An allegorical depiction in the weeks following the disaster ( Udo J. Keppler , 1912).
A bar in Agia Napa in Cyprus
The iceberg on a memorial relief for the musicians on the Titanic , Southampton (England)
The Titanic Belfast , in the capital of Northern Ireland
Two rock formations at Red Rocks Park near Denver named after the Titanic and the iceberg