Introduction
The Royal Mail Steamship Titanic was a British transatlantic ship which was
the biggest ship in the world at the time it sank in the North Atlantic Ocean. It was one
of the three transatlantic ships that make up the Olympic class, produced by White Star
Line, and constructed between 1909 and 1912 in Belfast´s shipyard.
Investigation
Throughout the twentieth century there were a lot of expeditions to
find the missing ship, although all of them were unsuccessful. Finally, the
remains of the tragically destroyed ship were discovered the first of September
in 1985. It was found 3.821 m deep in the sea and 675 km from Terranova.
Since the
ship sank until 1996, it was believed that the Titanic crashed with an iceberg
which made a 90 feet
fissure in the ship´s hull. However, in 1996, Robert Ballard discovered that
the plates of the hull were distorted and displaced, but not cut to length. The
real situation was that the collision with the iceberg did not make a hole in
the hull, but it broke the rivets that join the plates and this allowed the
water to get into the ship.
The new discovery
and its subsequent analysis performed by United States investigators, revealed that
the rivets used in the bow´s hull were of poor quality. They were made of iron
instead of steel, like in the rest of the ship. That might have happened because
of the inability of suppliers to meet the deadlines and quantities required by
the manufacturer.
Conclusion
The tragedy
cost 1512 lives due to drowning or hypothermia, and that makes this shipwreck
one of the worst maritime catastrophes in peace times in the history of the world.
