After the noise I saw a huge column of black smoke slightly lighter than the sky rising high into the sky and then flattening out at the top like a mushroom.” I last saw the ship with her stern high in the air going down. “We were probably a mile away when the Titanic’s lights went out. This was observed by Titanic First Class passenger Philipp Edmund Mock from Lifeboat Number 11: This was observed from the lifeboats as Titanic sank, when the warm smoke from the sinking ship was seen to rise up through the cold air near the sea surface quickly, in a column but when it hit the capping inversion, the smoke was cooler than the much warmer air above and so immediately stopped rising, flattening out at the top of the column. This arrangement of warm air over freezing air at Titanic’s crash site is known as a thermal inversion. The cold icebergs and icy meltwater in the Labrador Current had chilled the formerly warm air, which had previously been heated to approximately 10 degrees Celsius by the warm waters of the Gulf Stream so the air column at Titanic’s crash site was freezing from sea level, up to a height of about 60 meters – almost the height of the tallest icebergs, and then about 10 degrees Celsius above that height. The sudden temperature change as Titanic crossed from the warm waters of the Gulf Stream into the much colder waters of the Labrador Current was recorded by her Second Officer, Charles Lightoller, who testified that there was a drop in temperature of four degrees Celsius in the half hour between 7pm and 7.30pm on the night of the fatal collision, and a drop in temperature of ten degrees Celsius in the two hours between 7pm and 9pm that night, when the air approached freezing. The rescue ship Mackay Bennett, also recovering bodies in 1912, drew the following map of water temperatures at Titanic’s wreck site, which also records this sharp boundary between the warm waters of the Gulf Stream and the cold waters of the Labrador current, and its proximity to Titanic’s wreck site (the red crosses mark where the bodies of victims were found floating, and recovered): Water changed from 36 to 56 in half mile”. “Northern edge of Gulf Stream well defined. The sharpness of the boundary between the warm waters of the Gulf Stream and the freezing waters of the Labrador Current, and its proximity to Titanic’s wreck site, was recorded after the disaster by the SS Minia, who whilst drifting and collecting bodies near Titanic’s wreck site noted in her log: These giant bergs and field ice were flowing southwards in the meltwater of the swollen Labrador Current, bringing freezing air up to a height of the tallest of these bergs into an area of sea normally occupied by the 12 degrees Celsius Gulf Stream, like a cold river in flood, bursting its banks and flowing over much warmer land. The icebergs was up on every point of the compass, almost.” “In the morning, when it turned daybreak, we could see icebergs everywhere also a field of ice about 20 to 30 miles long, which it took the Carpathia 2 miles to get clear from when it picked the boats up. He counted 25 large ones, 150 to 200 feet high, and stopped counting the smaller ones there were dozens and dozens all over the place”Īnd this was confirmed by Titanic’s Quartermaster Hitchens: to S.E….I sent a Junior Officer to the top of the wheelhouse, and told him to count the icebergs 150 to 200 feet high I sampled out one or two and told him to count the icebergs of about that size. “…about two or three miles from the position of the “Titanic’s” wreckage we saw a huge ice-field extending as far as we could see, N.W. As Captain Rostron of the rescue ship Carpathia explained: When the Titanic sank on the moonless night of 14/15th April 1912 she was surrounded by icebergs and on the edge of a large ice field.
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