BBC Nature_The Iceberg That Sank the Titanic
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00:00On April the 14th, 1912, two giants were on a collision course in the North Atlantic.
00:10One was a natural Leviathan, 15,000 years in the making.
00:17The other, a massive luxury liner whose very name, Titanic, symbolized the colossal confidence
00:23of the age.
00:25But even though ice conquered steel, the iceberg became a mere bit part in the Titanic legend.
00:35The chances of colliding with a berg this far into the transatlantic shipping lanes
00:39were tiny.
00:40So where did it come from, and how did it get there?
00:48Scientists have worked out how icebergs are conceived, and how, like an animal presence,
00:53they live out their lives on the ocean.
00:56Now, for the first time, we retrace its 6,000-kilometer journey, reveal the monumental forces that
01:05shaped it, and recreate the last moments of one of the most deadly natural destroyers
01:12on the high seas.
01:23This is the untold story of the most famous iceberg in history.
01:52The rusting hulk of the Titanic continues to haunt us.
02:06It's a catastrophe which has been minutely documented and scrutinized.
02:11But the only record we have of the iceberg that sank her is a single photograph taken
02:16the cold morning after.
02:20Eyewitness reports vary.
02:21Some say it was 30 meters high and 100 meters wide.
02:27What we know for certain is that it was a long way from home.
02:33The collision site was about the same latitude as New York.
02:37So how did that huge lump of ice travel so far south?
02:45The International Ice Patrol went into action the year after the disaster.
02:51Every iceberg season since, March to July, they've tracked bergs over the North Atlantic.
02:57They've done more than just protect ships.
03:00They've uncovered the secret life of the most infamous berg of all.
03:08Each iceberg is unique, a freshwater ice sculpture molded by its individual journey around the
03:14polar seas.
03:15They float low in the water because of the sheer tonnage of ice.
03:23That's why the tip of an iceberg is no measure of what lies beneath.
03:30And why, to this day, they're such a danger to ships.
03:47But they are notoriously difficult to keep tabs on.
03:50Day by day, they split, fracture, and melt, changing their appearance completely.
03:59Icebergs are masters of disguise.
04:03The Titanic iceberg had its own secret history, but the Ice Patrol has now traced where it
04:10came from.
04:18Thousands of kilometers due north of the collision site is Greenland.
04:23Eighty-five percent of all icebergs found in the North Atlantic come from massive ice
04:28fjords on Greenland's west coast, like this one at Ilulissat.
04:39So much ice is traveling down this inlet that it completely covers the water surface.
04:47And it leads us to the biggest iceberg production line of them all.
04:53Julian Doudswell of the Scott Polar Research Institute believes this 80-meter wall of mother
04:58ice is the most likely birthplace of the Titanic iceberg.
05:02We're below the height of the ice cliffs on this six-kilometer-wide front of the ice stream.
05:10It's incredibly spectacular to be able to look up at the ice itself, at the colors of
05:15blue and white that are mixed together.
05:18At some places, it's completely evident that very recent carving has taken place, that
05:23new icebergs have effectively just been born.
05:28This single wall of ice produces more icebergs than anywhere else in the Northern Hemisphere.
05:34Thousands each year, fed from an ice basin the size of England.
05:41Hikes from here take about three years to reach the North Atlantic.
05:45The iceberg that sank the Titanic would have carved in 1909, just as work began on the
05:51ship itself.
06:05But, in fact, this was not the beginning of the iceberg story.
06:26The ice cliff was its birthplace, but it had been conceived 15,000 years earlier, back
06:32in the Stone Age, before man had ever taken to the sea.
06:44Julian has traced back to where it all began, 600 kilometers inland from the Ilulissat ice
06:50cliff.
06:57I'm standing close to the center of the Greenland ice sheet.
07:01Beneath me is about 3,000 meters of ice, and looking into the distance, I can see nothing
07:09but white.
07:10The iceberg that ended up sinking the Titanic would have began its life here as a snowflake.
07:18How could a harmless snowflake become capable of ripping open a steel hull?
07:23The snow that falls here is, at first, fluffy and not particularly dense.
07:31As it compacts with depth, it becomes a third of its former size.
07:39Tens of meters below the surface, it becomes so dense it turns to solid glacial ice.
07:46Bubbles become trapped within it.
07:50Each bubble holds captive a breath of its conception air, a record of the polar atmosphere
07:56that it will carry for 15,000 years.
08:00To be released by an iceberg in the North Atlantic.
08:10But how does this rock-solid ice transform into birds?
08:17The agent of change is meltwater.
08:20Through countless Arctic summers, meltwater pools on the surface of the ice sheet before
08:25boring down into its heart.
08:37In this frozen underworld, glaciologists have discovered a labyrinth of passageways cutting
08:42right through the ice sheet.
08:45They are fault lines which orchestrate how an iceberg will form.
08:54The walls of future icebergs in frozen suspension.
09:04Centuries before the Titanic was even conceived on the drawing board, the blueprint of its
09:09nemesis had been laid down.
09:14But the developing iceberg was still frozen to the Greenland bedrock, barely moving for
09:19nearly 15,000 years.
09:23So how did this terrifying beast ever get to the sea?
09:34In some places the Earth's inner heat warms the base of the ice sheet and the lowest layers
09:39of ice begin to melt.
09:44This releases the ice mass from the bedrock.
09:48This is how the Titanic iceberg and all the other bergs around it were set in motion.
10:03Ripped apart by the strains of movement, crevasses open up.
10:10Scars and weaknesses the iceberg would carry for the rest of its life.
10:18At a remarkable seven kilometers a year, top speed for an ice stream, it slid down
10:23the vast Ilulissat drainage basin.
10:39Under its own weight it ground up the bedrock, absorbing the fragments into its great bulk.
10:44It would have covered this last 300 kilometers to the coast in less than 50 years.
11:00Eventually the vast Ilulissat ice stream narrows into the fjord.
11:05So much ice is drawn through this bottleneck and at such speed that the sea in front of
11:10the carving front is always choked.
11:17In 1909, as the Titanic iceberg was accelerating towards the end of its production line, work
11:24on the ship was just beginning.
11:31Three thousand kilometers away, at the Harland and Wolff shipyards in Belfast, the largest
11:36keel ever was being laid down.
11:39In both size and luxury, this liner was intended to be Titanic.
11:48Plate by plate, rivet by rivet, 40,000 tons of steel were assembled within the largest
11:55dry dock in the world.
11:59The Ilulissat glacier, meanwhile, was creating a rival giant.
12:04Only the mightiest icebergs make it down to the shipping lanes.
12:07In 1909, the Ilulissat was producing just one or two of these mega-bergs each year.
12:38Sometime in the summer months, one such megalith would have started towards its date with destiny.
12:58Perhaps three kilometers long, it could have displaced a billion tons of seawater.
13:07It would have dwarfed even the Titanic.
13:21In her dry dock, she was being armor plated with 20 mil steel, the finest grade of the
13:30day.
13:31But even the strongest steel would be no match for the millions of tons of icy reality ahead.
13:38Man's confidence in a new age of technology was embodied in this one ship.
13:47Perhaps for the first time, we became complacent about the power of the natural world.
13:56More than anything, the Titanic's owners wanted to outclass their transatlantic rival.
14:02Harland and Wolff worked at double time.
14:08While the Titanic project went full steam ahead, the mega-berg was going nowhere.
14:17Up near the carving ice front, the icebergs are on the very first part of their journey.
14:23It's a slow journey to begin with, because they're jammed together in this great amalgam
14:29of icebergs and brush ice.
14:33It would have taken the mega-berg over a year to edge its way down the 60 kilometer fjord.
14:59While the Titanic's ship rose up above the Belfast skyline, the massive berg was under
15:20Battered and eroded by the relentless jostling of other bergs.
15:34Within this first year of life, the mega-berg would have halved its berth weight.
15:39But it was still a giant, capable of turning lesser bergs upside down.
15:50That's when they revealed the grip they have scarred from the Greenland bedrock.
16:00But where the Ilulissat fjord meets the sea, the mega-berg would have been stopped in its tracks.
16:16Although the fjord is very deep, its mouth is very shallow.
16:20The huge keels of mega-bergs can easily run aground here.
16:26The Titanic iceberg was stuck.
16:29But with other bergs backing up behind it, something had to give.
16:38It was an unstable situation, which even today can unleash a phenomenal amount of power.
16:45Living just a few hundred meters from these brooding giants is the Inuit fishing community of Ilulissat.
16:52Here, a home video captured the moment when a modern-day mega-berg reached its tipping point.
17:08Two fishermen, Ili and Soren, had a lucky escape.
17:14We sailed from Ilulissat a little late that day.
17:17Other fishermen had already gone.
17:20Maybe it is the reason why we are still alive.
17:27We didn't hear anything because we were sailing fast.
17:30Normally you can hear signs when an iceberg is going to roll.
17:46Ili panicked and screamed and wanted to cut us free.
18:00Afterwards we sailed as fast as we could.
18:03We could see the big waves, it was dangerous.
18:06It was unbelievable.
18:12The rolling iceberg produced a terrifying tsunami.
18:41Ili and Soren escaped it by heading out to sea.
18:50No records exist from 1910, but perhaps the titanic iceberg had claimed lives even before it had left the Greenland coast.
19:04By rolling, it had lifted itself over the fjord mouth.
19:08It was free.
19:10The mega-berg was by now only a kilometre across, but it had reached the open ocean.
19:40Just beyond the fjord, Ili and Soren set sail.
20:09Just beyond the fjord is remarkable evidence of the route the mega-berg may have taken as it passed through Greenland's coastal waters.
20:20While at the sea surface, icebergs seem to be drifting serenely out of the fjord, at depth it's quite a different story.
20:28When icebergs impact the seafloor with their deep keels, ploughing takes place, and in fact the whole of the seafloor is a series of cross-cut plough marks.
20:43We have evidence here from side-scan sonar records.
20:49It reveals that almost the whole of the Greenland shelf is being cut to ribbons by the actions of many, many iceberg keels.
21:01Could our iceberg have passed this way?
21:04The largest iceberg scour marks, or plough marks, of the seafloor are up to about 20 kilometres in length, several hundred metres wide, and between 5 and 10 metres deep.
21:19If the iceberg that sank the Titanic crossed this part of the Greenland shelf, we may even be looking at the plough mark produced by that iceberg.
21:37Perhaps, sometime in late 1910, the massive berg left its calling card in the muddy sediments along Greenland's west coast.
21:56In Belfast, the Titanic's pioneering hull had been completed.
22:05Now it was her turn to slip into the water for the first time.
22:11Both giants had broken their ties with the land.
22:18But while the Titanic was anchored, ready to be fitted out, the iceberg took an unexpected turn.
22:28Ships are buffeted by wind and waves, but big icebergs with vast keels are pushed around by deep ocean currents.
22:39In 1911, the Titanic iceberg would have been picked up on the powerful West Greenland current.
22:46And, instead of drifting towards the shipping lanes and the fatal collision site, it went the other way.
22:54It headed north.
22:57In these early stages of its journey, it would have seemed no threat to anyone.
23:01But icebergs are very unpredictable.
23:09Claude Daly, ice engineer at Memorial University in Newfoundland, has studied how young icebergs change personality at sea.
23:18When my oldest daughter was in high school, she was looking for a science project to work on.
23:23And she suggested that she come and do a test on ice.
23:27And we wondered, well, what could she do on ice?
23:31And I said, why don't we make some small icebergs and see how they melt?
23:40We just did tests. The blocks of ice were just floated in water.
23:44And we watched to see what happened.
23:49The water melts the bottom of the iceberg.
23:53The waves lap against the iceberg around the water line.
23:57And a kind of a waistline is formed.
24:01And then the sun melts the top of the ice.
24:04And you get water flowing off the top of the iceberg.
24:07With these different melting processes, what you find is you get pieces of ice that are either hanging over, if they're above water,
24:16or there's a tongue of ice sticking out below the water line.
24:20There's this tremendous weight pushing down and the buoyant forces from the water pushing up.
24:26And that's potential energy.
24:28They look so peaceful when they're just sitting there.
24:33It would take an extremely large explosive device to come close to the amount of locked-in energy in an iceberg.
24:46Like a coiled spring, an iceberg can unleash this energy at any moment.
24:55Extraordinarily, these tensions deep within its frame have a voice.
25:00As seawater forces through its crevasses and fissures, its creaking body resonates.
25:08Since each berg is a unique shape and size, the Titanic iceberg would have had its own sounds.
25:18But it might not have reached full voice until the autumn of 1911,
25:22when the Greenland current dragged it north into the Arctic and a world of sea ice.
25:30Sea ice can be over a meter thick.
25:33The very largest bergs plow right through it.
25:36But the knocks and blows they receive cause veins of seawater deep within them to vibrate,
25:42like the air in a set of organ pipes.
25:56As they bump their way through the thick sea ice, each iceberg resonates to its own music.
26:06TITANIC ISLANDS
26:37TITANIC ISLANDS
26:45The Titanic iceberg may have been a force for good up here, as much a life-giver as a life-taker.
26:53For when giant icebergs get dragged onwards by the Greenland current, they break open natural sea lanes.
27:02They also stir up nutrients, which allow sea mammals such as beluga and narwhal to feed in their wake.
27:18Perhaps the whales are also responding to the extraordinary symphony playing around them.
27:33TITANIC ISLANDS
27:44Icebergs are part of the delicate ecology in these frozen seas.
28:03Leaving lesser bergs to freeze in the pack ice, the icy megalith drifted on into its middle age,
28:10and the long, dark Arctic winter of 1911.
28:23Back in Belfast, through those same winter months, finishing touches were added to the Titanic's interior.
28:30No expense was spared to create this floating palace.
28:34The Castle of Ice was now 4,000 kilometers from the shipping lanes,
28:38and an encounter with the world's largest liner couldn't have seemed more improbable.
28:44But in the new year, everything changed.
28:49At the polar ice cap, the West Greenland current curls and turns south.
28:55It dragged the Titanic iceberg with it down the northeastern coast of Canada.
29:01Tickets for the Titanic's maiden voyage were going on sale,
29:05just as a deadly armada was unleashed from the natural world.
29:10TITANIC ISLANDS
29:20The weathered surfaces of each berg have their own tale to tell.
29:32The chips and fractures read like a history of their individual journeys around the polar seas.
29:38They've been sculpted into icy skyscrapers.
29:46Even now, the Titanic iceberg would have been huge.
29:50The above-water ice alone would have rivaled the Coliseum in size.
30:00Early in 1912, as many as 10,000 battle-scarred giants may have emerged from their polar expedition.
30:08The chances of the ship meeting the berg had just risen dramatically.
30:30Every day, the Titanic iceberg would have been moving 20 kilometers further south.
30:37There were just eight weeks to go before its meeting with the world's most famous ship.
30:45On the other side of the ocean, the Titanic was almost complete.
30:51After a day of sea trials, on April 2nd, it headed down to Southampton to prepare for its maiden voyage.
31:00The iceberg's route south was far from plain sailing.
31:07A ragged, rocky shelf fingering out from the Newfoundland coast snares many passing icebergs.
31:27Stranded, 3,000 kilometers from home, many Greenland icebergs end up melting along this coastline.
31:37The Titanic iceberg could easily have met a similar fate,
31:41but the deep Labrador current pulled it wide of the coast and continued to control its journey south.
31:49By now, it was a weathered old beast, and the warming temperatures were taking their toll.
31:54The ancient snowflakes at its center were still at minus 20 degrees centigrade,
31:58and the icebergs were still moving.
32:02The ancient snowflakes at its center were still at minus 20 degrees centigrade,
32:06but its surface was being eaten away by sun and sea,
32:10and this would change its behavior radically.
32:22And when you get an old iceberg, they're the least stable.
32:27If you just tap them with your finger, maybe nothing will happen.
32:32Maybe everything will happen.
32:35The experiment with my daughter, what we found was, with a cube of ice floating in water,
32:42it starts off quite stable.
32:49But then, as the bottom melts off the ice block,
32:54it doesn't take long before the ice is unstable, and it rolls on its side.
33:07What's now under the water is a different shape, and it melts off, and then again it rolls.
33:14And there's a sequence of melting and rolling and melting and rolling,
33:20and it got faster and faster and faster.
33:25By the time the piece of ice was down to about the size of a baseball,
33:30it was rolling constantly. It was alive.
33:38The iceberg's life was unraveling, too.
33:42Now less than a tenth of its original size,
33:45it was probably rolling over every three or four days and melting fast.
33:50It had, at most, two weeks of life left as it moved towards the Grand Banks.
33:57The banks are a shallow area of sea, but scything through them is a deep trough.
34:03The Labrador current funnels the icebergs down this channel, giving it the name Iceberg Alley.
34:10At its southern end, it drags the icebergs right into the transatlantic shipping lanes.
34:18Only 1% of all bergs make it this far south,
34:22and even at this late stage, the collision might never have happened.
34:273,000 kilometers to the east, in Southampton,
34:30the Titanic's owners, White Star Line, were deciding whether to delay the crossing.
34:39A national coal strike was in progress,
34:42and there simply wasn't enough coal at the port to get the liner to New York.
34:47But the company was so keen to get their starship underway
34:51that they borrowed coal from the holds of other vessels.
35:03On schedule, around midday on the 10th of April, 1912,
35:07the Titanic and her 2,227 passengers steamed into the English Channel.
35:37Seven lucky passengers were dropped off in Queenstown, in Ireland,
35:41and the Titanic headed into the Atlantic Ocean.
35:44RWS 7
35:45TITANIC
35:48Dunlop, Ireland
35:54Seven lucky passengers were dropped off in Queenstown, in Ireland,
35:58and the Titanic headed into the Atlantic Ocean.
36:07Two days into their journey,
36:08they received several warnings about the large amount of ice ahead.
36:12Captain Smith adjusted his heading to the south.
36:16In any other year, that might have been far enough,
36:20but 1912 was a bad year for Bergs.
36:24As the diners in the opulent staterooms
36:28finished their evening meal on the night of April the 14th,
36:32the Stokers brought another of the ship's 29 boilers on stream.
36:36They were steaming through the darkness of the North Atlantic
36:40at more than 21 knots.
36:48There's a simple reason why the lookout wouldn't have been able
36:52to spot anything ahead until too late.
36:56Tonight is a night like the night that the Titanic hit the iceberg.
37:00There's no moon. It's fairly calm.
37:04We can see a few lights in the ocean here tonight,
37:08and those are the lights that let us see objects.
37:12But if we were the only light in the ocean,
37:16then the light would be going out from us.
37:20The Titanic itself was a sea of light, like a city.
37:24It lights up the neighborhood. You can't see outside of it.
37:28Of course, their eyes were accustomed to the light on board.
37:33It was much more than the nothing that was out around them.
37:48If we were on the iceberg, we would have spotted the Titanic coming.
37:56But the reverse was not true.
38:02In a calm sea, there would have been no wave action
38:06around the base of the iceberg.
38:10It would have been completely black.
38:14Modern vessels have radar. They didn't have radar.
38:18Modern vessels have searchlights that reach miles ahead.
38:26Ninety percent of an iceberg
38:30and 90 percent of an ice cube in your glass is below the water level.
38:34And so if you can see an iceberg, you're just seeing 10 percent of it.
38:50They would have needed to get so close to it
38:54that some of the lights of the vessel shone on the white ice
38:58that reflected back.
39:02It would have just completely surprised them.
39:06Iceberg! Right ahead!
39:10Their first instinct was to turn.
39:14Iceberg! Right ahead!
39:18It was the worst decision they could have made.
39:22I've been on ships that have hit ice head-on, come to a sudden stop.
39:28As the bow of the ship is crushing crumpling,
39:32that acts as a buffer, as a cushion.
39:36Had the Titanic hit head-on,
39:40the ship would have come to a shuddering stop.
39:44Most people would have been knocked over. China's all over the place.
39:48Pots in the kitchen are on the floor, boiling water everywhere.
39:52They would clean up the mess,
39:56take a break, carry on their way, and they would have got home again.
40:02Today, we would say it's obvious,
40:06train people to hit icebergs head-on.
40:10But it isn't a natural thing to run into a wall at high speed.
40:14It isn't natural.
40:18It's completely understandable that they've tried to avoid a major accident.
40:26Ships turn very slowly.
40:30The Titanic turned particularly slowly and had a relatively small rudder
40:34for the size of the vessel.
40:38It would have been agonizing to wait
40:42for this large ship to slowly take on a new heading.
40:48While that was occurring, of course,
40:52it got closer and closer, and it would have all been in a kind of slow motion.
40:56The order was given to put the engines in reverse.
41:00I think that was a bad idea.
41:04I think that was a really bad idea.
41:08The rudders work because they have high-speed flow over them.
41:12It seems to me it was done
41:16out of a kind of panic, that's all I can think,
41:20that these two actions don't make sense together.
41:38And instead of flooding one part of the vessel,
41:42which no passenger ever went to,
41:46they flooded parts of the vessel, flooding the engines and flooding the cargo spaces,
41:50flooding parts of the vessel that they needed
41:54to stay dry if it was going to stay upright and stay floating in the water.
42:04This meeting, 15,000 years in the making,
42:08lasted seconds, a blink of an eye in the iceberg's long lifetime.
42:16Even a rigid steel hull is but paper to half a million tons of solid ice,
42:20a fatal oversight which cost over 1,500 lives.
42:32While news of the tragedy tapped along the wires,
42:36the iceberg floated on.
42:40Some see an incriminating scrape of paint on its surface.
42:46But all we can really tell from its appearance
42:50is that it would have been rolling continually, highly unstable,
42:54a burg that was in its own death throes.
43:00Warmer Gulf Stream water was eating voraciously into its heart.
43:04The ancient leviathan had been reduced to a shard of ice.
43:20Titanic had been expected to make many journeys through these waters.
43:28But the iceberg was too heavy to carry.
43:32But the iceberg's maiden voyage was always to be its last.
43:36In late April, 1912,
43:40barely a week or two after the Titanic's demise,
43:44over 2,000 kilometres below sea level,
43:48the iceberg sank.
43:52It was the last of its kind.
43:56It was the last of its kind.
44:00It was the last of its kind.
44:04In late April, 1912,
44:08barely a week after the Titanic's demise,
44:12over 2,000 kilometres from its birthplace,
44:16the last piece of the iceberg disappeared into the Atlantic Ocean.
44:20Some way from the rusting hull of the Titanic,
44:24there will be a scattering of soil
44:28where the last of the iceberg's rocky sediments
44:32The iceberg was remembered as a destructive force,
44:36but was the tragedy that befell the liner as much to do with our own
44:40overreaching ambition?
44:46The disaster made us pay attention to icebergs.
44:50In the decades since, fear of them has turned to wonder.
44:56We've come to appreciate them as remarkable and beautiful natural objects.
45:00More recently, we've learned that they,
45:04and the currents which transport them,
45:08play a crucial role in regulating our climate.
45:12There is a delicate balance between the amount of ice
45:16melting from the Greenland ice sheet
45:20and the way in which currents flow through the Atlantic Ocean.
45:24Global warming is threatening this balance.
45:28Scientists predict that a flood of polar meltwater
45:32could change the salinity of the North Atlantic,
45:36weaken the Gulf Stream,
45:40and bring a bit of the Arctic permanently to the Aegean shores.
45:44Preserving the world's polar regions
45:48has never been more important.
46:28Every year, the International Ice Patrol honors
46:32the lost souls of the Titanic with a wreath drop over the wreck site.
46:36It is with great respect and reverence
46:40that we commemorate this anniversary of the sinking of the RMS Titanic
46:44on April 15, 1912. We remember the over 1,500
46:48souls who perished on that fateful day.
46:52On behalf of the United States Coast Guard and the family and friends of those who perished
46:56on the sinking of the Titanic, we cast these wreaths.
47:26Join us next week
47:30for the secret battle of how rugby became professional
47:34in Stealing Rugby next Thursday night.
47:38And on Sunday, battle the elements during the extreme winter of the Yukon
47:42as we follow the migration of the caribou
47:46on Incredible Journeys with Steve Leonard, 7.30 Sunday night on ABC.
47:56♪
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