Crew member Frederick Fleet described hitting the iceberg as a narrow shave, thinking they’d avoided disaster. Many passengers didn’t realize the ship had struck anything. Yet the collision was deadly.
The Titanic’s builders designed the ship to withstand four of its 16 compartments flooding. Edward Wilding, a naval architect who worked on the design, speculated from the beginning that the iceberg scraping alongside the ship punctured more than four sections. Enough water flowed in to pull down the entire ship.
The portion of the ship that struck the iceberg slammed into the seafloor when it sank. It’s now buried in mud. Even if it were visible, it would likely be difficult to tell the difference between the damage before and after sinking.
For the documentary, researchers from University College London and Newcastle University put together a simulation to find some potential answers. Using the ship’s blueprints and estimated speed, they found that the iceberg may have torn open an 18-square-foot gash along six compartments, enough to take down the Titanic.
The simulation aligned very closely with Wilding’s speculations from over 100 years ago.
“He really knew that ship,” Anthony Geffen, the film’s producer, told BI, which is perhaps why they match so well.
With much of the bow sunk in the mud, we may never know the full story of the iceberg’s effect, Stephenson said.
