Posted by Tim Maltin commented in The Times and the Daily Mail on 12th April 2024 on evidence from a precis law report in 1913, which sheds new light on the Titanic disaster. Evidence from Titanic’s lookouts confirm the haze around the horizon, and that the berg appeared out of this haze. But the officers and passengers described it as a clear night.
Lookout Lee’s evidence explains that the haze was only apparent from the crow’s nest, high above Titanic’s deck, and that when he was on the water in a lifeboat the horizon appeared clear.
The height-specific nature of the haze is consistent with a miraging haze caused in a thermal inversion, created by the enormous amount of ice in the vicinity of the Titanic.
Maltin explained that the unusual weather conditions both led to the vessel’s collision with the iceberg and hampered the would-be rescue efforts of a nearby steamer, the Californian.
“The reason why the berg appeared to be dark was because they were seeing it against a lighter haze,” Tim commented.
Tim suggested that the crew of SS Californian saw Titanic with a false horizon behind it and concluded that they were looking not at a big ship in the distance but at a smaller ship that was closer by, which they believed did not have radio.
He explained that the layers of air in the atmosphere “effectively scrambled Titanic and Californian’s Morse lamp signals to each other”, leaving crews unable to read one another’s Morse signals.
Maltin, author of Titanic: A Very Deceiving Night, found reports of abnormal ‘refraction’ and ‘mirage’ mentioned in the logs of several ships in the area at the time.
Read the full articles published in The Times and in the Daily Mail here: