![]() ![]() The second photograph, which is pictured here below right, was taken by the chief steward of the liner Prinze Adelbert, which was passing through the area of the sinking on the morning of Monday 15th April. The first of these photographs is seen here on the left, and was taken by Captain de Carteret of the Minia, one of the vessels hired by the White Star Line to search for bodies following the sinking. But in the days after the sinking, various people took pictures of icebergs in the area where Titanic sank, and who knows, one of them could well be the very one that sank her. Fleet drew this picture of the collision shown here on the left, although the size of the iceberg has been greatly exaggerated. The two people with perhaps the best view were undoubtedly the Lookout, Frederick Fleet and Reginald Lee. Although only a handful of people aboard Titanic saw the actual iceberg, no-one managed to get a photograph of it, due to the fact that it all happened so quickly, and as it was night-time, everybody was below-decks. The iceberg that Titanic collided with on that bitterly-cold April night in 1912 was reported in the newspapers as being anywhere between 50-100 feet high, and anything between 200-400 feet in length. Between 18, 14 vessels were lost and 40 seriously damaged due to ice in this notorious part of the hostile North Atlantic, and this figure doesn’t even take in the huge amount of fishing vessels operating in that same period. Records show that as far back as 1833, the Lady Of The Lake sank with the loss of 70 souls after colliding with an iceberg in the Grand Banks area. Icebergs were not a new hazard to shipping in the North Atlantic when Titanic sank. It’s believed that the iceberg Titanic struck was a blue berg, making it very difficult to spot at night. The part of the newly exposed surface appears darker than the rest of the ice, and are known as ‘blue bergs’. ‘Bergs are composed almost entirely of fresh water, and as the iceberg melts, its centre of gravity can change, causing it to roll over to a new position. Between 10,000 and 15,000 icebergs break-off every year, but only about 500 of these actually make it as far south as the North Atlantic shipping lanes.Īs much as 85% of an iceberg’s bulk is underwater, and because of the strong currents that can push on the underside of it, it’s not uncommon to see an iceberg moving against a strong wind. But once they meet up with the warm waters of the Gulf Stream, most icebergs melt quickly, although in 1926, an iceberg drifted to within 150 nautical miles of Bermuda. As the glaciers reach the sea, large chunks break-off into the Baffin or the Labrador Sea, and eventually get caught-up in the colds of the Labrador Current, which takes them into the open waters of the North Atlantic. These glaciers are constantly moving, sometimes as much as 65 feet per day, due to the immense weight of the Greenland Ice Cap pushing down on them. The mountain of ice that Titanic tragically encountered in April, 1912 was first formed over 5,000 years ago, when layer after layer of snow and ice were compressed and crushed by yet more falling snow to form part of the immense Greenland Glacier. The Norse word ‘iceberg’ translates, not surprisingly, into ‘mountain of ice’. ![]()
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