Why did the sink? By History.com, adapted by Newsela staff on 04.18.18 Word Count 837 Level 1070L

Image 1. A watercolor illustration of the by German artist Willy Stower in 1912. Image from Shutterstock

On May 31, 1911, around 100,000 people gathered at a dock in , Ireland, to watch the launch of the world's largest and most luxurious cruise liner, the Titanic. The mighty ship was 882 feet long and 175 feet high. It weighed more than 46,000 tons.

The Titanic was considered to be an "unsinkable" ship. Yet on the night of April 14, 1912, disaster struck. Just four days after leaving , England, on its maiden voyage to , the Titanic struck an off the coast of Newfoundland, , and sank. More than 1,500 passengers and crew lost their lives.

Today, experts are still debating possible causes of this historic tragedy. Most agree that only a combination of factors can fully explain what doomed the supposedly unsinkable ship.

This article is available at 5 reading levels at https://newsela.com. 1 Speed Factor

From the beginning, some blamed the Titanic's skipper, Captain E.J. Smith, for sailing the massive ship at too high a high speed through iceberg-heavy waters. When the crash occurred, the ship was traveling over 25 miles an hour. Some believed Smith was foolishly trying to beat the crossing time of Titanic's sister ship, the Olympic.

In 2004, however, engineer Robert Essenhigh offered a completely different explanation. Essenhigh suggested that efforts to control a fire in one of the ship's coal bunkers could have explained the Titanic's speed.

Iceberg Warning Ignored

Less than an hour before the Titanic hit the iceberg, another nearby ship, the Californian, radioed to say it had been stopped by a dense ice field. However, the warning didn't begin with the three- letter code "MSG," normally used for particularly important messages that needed to be seen by the captain. For that reason, the Titanic's radio operator, Jack Phillips, considered the other ship's warning non-urgent. As a result, he didn't pass it along.

This article is available at 5 reading levels at https://newsela.com. 2 Wrong Turn At Sea

In 2010, a new explanation for the crash was offered by Louise Patten, the granddaughter of the highest-ranking Titanic officer to survive, . Patten said she heard the story from her grandmother.

According to Patten's account, one of the ship's crew members panicked after hearing the order to turn "hard-a-starboard" in order to avoid the approaching iceberg. Instead of making a sharp right turn, he turned the wrong way — directly toward the ice.

Questionable Building Material

In 1985, an American-French expedition finally located the sunken . Investigators discovered that the ship had not gone down in one piece, as previously believed. Instead, it had broken apart on the ocean's surface.

This article is available at 5 reading levels at https://newsela.com. 3 Materials scientists Tim Foecke and Jennifer Hooper McCarty have cast blame on the rivets that held the hull's steel plates together. They examined rivets brought up from the wreck and found they contained a high concentration of "slag," a waste product created when metal is refined. Slag is not strong, and can easily split apart. It would only have been mixed in to lower costs. Its presence may have weakened the part of the Titanic's hull that hit the iceberg, causing it to break apart.

Tricky Weather Conditions

Two studies done around 2012 suggest that nature played a key role in the ship's fate. The first argued that the Earth came unusually close to both the moon and the sun that year, increasing their gravitational pull on the ocean. This resulted in record tides, which caused increased amounts of floating ice in the North Atlantic.

The second study was conducted by British historian Tim Maltin. It claimed that atmospheric conditions on the night of the disaster might have caused a phenomenon called super refraction. This bending of light could have created mirages, or visual illusions, that prevented the Titanic's lookouts from seeing the iceberg clearly.

It also would have made the Titanic appear closer, and smaller, to the nearby ship Californian. The Californian's crew might have assumed the Titanic was a different ship. And when the Titanic started to sink, the night's hazy conditions could have made it look as if it was merely sailing away.

No Binoculars To Spot Iceberg

Second Officer held the key to the storage room where the Titanic's binoculars were kept. Blair was transferred off the ship before it sailed from Southampton. As he left, he forgot to hand over the key to the officer who replaced him. After the sinking, a lookout on the Titanic said binoculars might have helped them spot and dodge the iceberg in time.

Not Enough Lifeboats

No matter what caused the Titanic to sink, many fewer people might have died had the ship had carried enough lifeboats. The liner left Southampton with only 20 lifeboats, which could only have carried 1,178 people.

In addition, the 20 lifeboats on the ship were not used to capacity. Due to the chaos that broke out after the Titanic struck the iceberg, the lifeboats departed the ship with about 400 empty seats. More than 1,500 people were left behind to perish in the freezing ocean waters.

This article is available at 5 reading levels at https://newsela.com. 4