Titanic: A Very Deceiving Night
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Similarly, First Class passenger Colonel Archibald Gracie noticed how a pall of smoke hung in the stratified air above Titanic’s wreckage, as he rose to the surface following being sucked under by the sinking Titanic:
“What impressed me at the time that my eyes beheld the horrible scene was a thin light-grey smoky vapor that hung like a pall a few feet above the broad expanse of sea that was covered with a mass of tangled wreckage. That it was a tangible vapor, and not a product of imagination, I feel assured. It may have been caused by smoke or steam rising to the surface around the area where the ship had sunk. At any rate it produced a supernatural effect, and the pictures I had seen by Dante and the description I had read in my Virgil of the infernal regions, of Charon, and the River Lethe, were then upper-most in my thoughts.”
Colonel Archibald Gracie © St Paul’s School
This is all evidence of the heavily stratified air at Titanic’s wreck site, with cold, dense air near the sea and much warmer, less dense air higher up. It’s also probable that the flat-topped smoke observed by Philipp Mock would have been trapped at the top of the cold band of refracting air, as is the smoke from the chimney below, photographed in miraging conditions, but where there was more wind than on the night the Titanic sank. Nevertheless, it shows how warm smoke will be trapped below a cold, miraging band:
Smoke trapped in an inverting layer, photograph by Pekka Parviainen
High pressure
A thermal inversion would normally cause water vapour near the surface of the sea to be prevented from rising up into the warmer, less dense air above, forming a thick fog within the inverting layer. However, examination of the weather records for Titanic’s wreck site on the night of the sinking reveals that she sank in the centre of a 1035mb Arctic High. This was the highest pressure in the northern hemisphere at that time and is a most unusually high pressure to be experienced on the North Atlantic in April:
Northern hemisphere synoptic weather chart, 15th April 1912
As well as compounding the high density of the cold air near the sea surface that night, the sinking air in a high pressure system is always clearer than the air it replaces because it does not contain aerosols, which originate from processes at the Earth’s surface, such as fires, dust, sea salt, pollen, industrial pollution, etc.
In fact, the air in this system was particularly clear, as the high had formed almost directly over the North Pole, on 8th April 1912, and had swung down to Titanic’s wreck site along the non-industrial and almost unpopulated northern plains of Canada.
Moreover, because the sinking air heats adiabatically as its pressure increases, it reduces its relative humidity and this causes any moist aerosol particles to lose water and thus shrink. In effect, the aerosol is dried out in the air descending in a high-pressure system and smaller, dried aerosol particles are less effective in scattering light than larger water droplets. This caused the visibility at Titanic’s wreck site to be increased to well beyond the normal levels of seeing.
By overlaying this synoptic chart onto the satellite image of water temperatures at Titanic’s wreck site, one can see that Titanic sank in the centre of a ‘perfect storm’ of atmospheric conditions, conducive to both increased visibility and abnormal refraction:
Combination of synoptic chart and thermal image of Titanic’s wreck site, reveals the “perfect storm” in which Titanic sank
“Much refraction on horizon”
Miraging and abnormal refraction were recorded by other ships the area where the Titanic sank.
On 10th April 1912, the Deutschland, out of coal and drifting in the ice which the Titanic would later crash into, recorded the following in her log:
Extracts from the log book of the SS Deutschland, out of coal and drifting near Titanic
On the 11th April 1912 a ship called the Niagara had damaged her bow plates in a serious collision with ice in fog in the area where the Titanic sank. That accident occurred while passengers were enjoying dinner and the New York Herald described the dramatic encounter, as follows, on 17th April 1912:
Passengers were hurled headlong from their chairs and broken dishes and glass were scattered throughout the dining saloons. The next instant there was a panic among the passengers and they raced screaming and shouting to the decks…"I thought we were doomed," said Captain Juham yesterday. "At first I feared we had been in collision with another vessel as I hurried to the bridge. But when I saw it was an iceberg and that we were surrounded by ice as far as we could see through the fog, my fears for the safety of the passengers and the vessel grew….I am sure Captain Smith had a similar experience in practically the same locality when the Titanic went down."
Niagara recorded seeing miraging on the afternoon of the 12th April, whilst in the same area:
Extracts from the Greenwich Mean Noon Observations form of the S.S. Niagara
Further evidence of abnormal refraction in the area comes from the log of the Wilson Line steamer Marengo, bound from New York to Hull under the command of Captain G. W. Owen. On the night of the collision and sinking of the Titanic on the 14/15th April 1912 she was in the same longitude as the Titanic and only one degree south, and her log records both the clear, starlit night and the great refraction on the horizon:
Extracts from the log book of the S.S. Marengo
Seeing stars
Second Class passenger Lawrence Beesley also noticed the very bright stars that night and he gives us the best description of the extraordinary weather conditions the night the Titanic sank, in this fascinating and beautiful extract from his 1912 book, The Loss of the Titanic:
Lawrence Beesley © Mary Evans Picture Library
“As the oarsmen pulled slowly away we all turned and took a long look at the mighty vessel towering high above our midget boat, and I know it must have been the most extraordinary sight I shall ever be called upon to witness; I realize now how totally inadequate language is to convey to some other person who was not there any real impression of what we saw.
But the task must be attempted: the whole picture is so intensely dramatic that, while it is not possible to place on paper for eyes to see the actual likeness of the ship as she lay there, some sketch of the scene will be possible. First of all, the climatic conditions were extraordinary. The night was one of the most beautiful I have ever seen: the sky without a single cloud to mar the perfect brilliance of the stars, clustered so thickly together that in places there seemed almost more dazzling points of light set in the black sky than background of sky itself; and each star seemed, in the keen atmosphere, free from any haze, to have increased its brilliance tenfold and to twinkle and glitter with a staccato flash that made the sky seem nothing but a setting made for them in which to display their wonder. They seemed so near, and their light so much more intense than ever before, that fancy suggested they saw this beautiful ship in dire distress below and all their energies had awakened to flash messages across the black dome of the sky to each other, telling and warning of the calamity happening in the world beneath. Later, when the Titanic had gone down and we lay still on the sea waiting for the day to dawn or a ship to come, I remember looking up at the perfect sky and realizing why Shakespeare wrote the beautiful words he puts in the mouth of Lorenzo:
Sit, Jessica. Look how the floor of heaven
Is thick inlaid with patines of bright gold.
There’s not the smallest orb which thou behold’st
But in his motion like an angel sings,
Still quiring to the young-eyed cherubims;
Such harmony is in immortal souls;
But whilst this muddy vesture of decay
Doth grossly close it in, we cannot hear it.
But it seemed almost as it we could – that night: the stars seemed really to be alive and to talk. The complete absence of haze produced a phenomenon I had never seen before: where the sky met the sea the line was as clear and definite as the edge of a knife, so that the water and the air never merged gradually into each other and ble
nded to a softened rounded horizon, but each element was so exclusively separate that where a star came low down in the sky near the clear-cut edge of the water-line, it still lost none if its brilliance. As the earth revolved and the water edge came up and covered partially the star, as it were, it simply cut the star in two, the upper half continuing to sparkle as long as it was not entirely hidden, and throwing a long beam of light along the sea to us.
In the evidence before the United States Senate Committee the captain of one of the ships near us that night said the stars were so extraordinarily bright near the horizon that he was deceived into thinking that they were ships’ lights: he did not remember seeing such a night before. Those who were afloat will all agree with that statement: we were often deceived into thinking they were lights of a ship.
And next the cold air! Here again was something quite new to us: there was not a breath of wind to blow keenly round us as we stood in the boat, and because of its continued persistence to make us feel cold; it was just a keen, bitter, icy, motionless cold that came from nowhere and yet was there all the time; the stillness of it – if one can imagine “cold” being motionless and still – was what seemed new and strange.
And these – the sky and the air – were overhead; and below was the sea. Here again something uncommon: the surface was like a lake of oil, heaving gently up and down with a quiet motion that rocked our boat dreamily to and fro. We did not need to keep her head to the swell: often I watched her lying broadside-on to the tide, and with a boat loaded as we were, this would have been impossible with anything like a swell. The sea slipped away smoothly under the boat, and I think we never heard it lapping on the sides, so oily in appearance was the water. So when one of the stokers said he had been to sea for twenty-six years and never yet seen such a calm night, we accepted it as true without comment. Just as expressive was the remark of another: “It reminds me of a bloomin’ picnic!” It was quite true; it did: a picnic on a lake, or a quiet inland river like the Cam, or a backwater on the Thames.
And so in these conditions of sky and air and sea we gazed broadside on the Titanic from a short distance.
The black outline of her profile against the sky was bordered all round by stars studded in the sky, and all her funnels and masts were picked out in the same way: her bulk was seen where the stars were blotted out."
And Beesley’s extraordinary description of the stars that night agrees with many other survivors, including First Class Titanic passenger Mrs F.M. Warren:
“The sea was like glass, so smooth that the stars were clearly reflected.”
Beesley was describing a perfect thermal inversion. The stillness of the very cold air seemed new and strange to him because in an inversion there is none of the usual mixing of air we normally experience: each layer of air is colder and therefore more dense or heavier than the layer above it and so eddy motion in the atmosphere is reduced to almost nil, but the stratified layers of air do oscillate due to slight turbulence over a long distance, and this is what causes the stars to flash on and off, as the paths of the light beams from the stars are thrown across and then away from the observers eyes, and back again, causing an apparent staccato flashing on and off.
Even without the extraordinary staccato flashing of the stars caused by the stratified air in the inversion, the clear, calm, dark conditions that Beesley describes that night are hard to imagine, if one has not experienced them. But they do occur from time to time, as recorded in the following edited extract from the much more recent log of the research vessel Moira, by marine biologist Richard Chesher, Ph.D., when he was in 8 North 130 East:
The Moira on a clear, calm, moonless night © Dr. Richard Chester Ph.D.
"It’s so calm I can see each star reflected on the sea, slightly distorted, lifting and falling on the long low glossy ocean swells. Our universe of stars lies half way between the Philippines and Palau in the Western Caroline Islands. There has not been a breath of wind for two days…I sit and gaze at the stars. Try as I might I can't distinguish where the horizon is. Stars, stars, stars. Not one cloud out here tonight. No moon, just millions upon millions of stars. The way the sea reflects each star is mesmerising, I can even see the little bitty stars reflected on the utterly calm surface.”
Soft horizon
The very calm sea the night the Titanic sank created what is known as a soft horizon. Under ordinary circumstances, the sea is much darker than the sky at the horizon, and this contrast makes the sea horizon quite visible, even at night. The reason for this contrast lies in the waves: the sea at the horizon is reflecting the sky 30 or 40 degrees above the horizon, because what you see is the wave slopes that are tilted toward you, and that part of the sky is considerably darker than the sky just above the horizon. But in very calm conditions, the wave slopes are much smaller, and the sea reflects the sky just a few degrees above the horizon; so there is much less contrast. In the flat calm conditions of that night, there was no noticeable contrast at all. An example of this can be seen in the following photograph, where the exact position of the sea horizon can only be guessed at:
Photo © Ruth Hartnup (Ruth and Dave on Flickr)
This soft horizon is attested to by many survivors:
Lord: “We could not distinguish where the sky ended and where the water commenced. You understand, it was a flat calm.” “…It was a very strange night; it was hard to define where the sky ended and the water commenced. There was what you call a soft horizon. I was sometimes mistaking the stars low down on the horizon for steamer's lights.”
Groves: “The night was dark, brilliantly clear, with not a breath of wind and the sea showed no sign of movement with the horizon only discernible by the fact that the stars could be seen disappearing below it.”
8125. Could you see the horizon?
- No, you could not see where the horizon in the sky finished but you could see stars right down as far as the sea.
8135. Now, what did you see, and when?
- As I said before, the stars were showing right down to the horizon. It was very difficult at first to distinguish between the stars and a light, they were so low down. About 11.10, ship's time, I made out a steamer coming up a little bit abaft our starboard beam.
8143. What lights did you see?
- At first I just saw what I took to be one light, one white light, but, of course, when I saw her first I did not pay particular attention to her, because I thought it might have been a star rising.
Beesley: All night long we had watched the horizon with eager eyes for signs of a steamer’s lights…But what a night to see that first light on the horizon! We saw it many times as the earth revolved, and some stars rose on the clear [invisible] horizon and others sank down to it: there were “lights” on every quarter. Some we watched and followed until we saw the deception and grew wiser…Near what seemed to be the horizon on the port quarter we saw two lights close together…
Despite the soft horizon, the night seemed so clear that Titanic did not see any need to reduce speed:
At 9.30pm that night, when Titanic’s Second Officer Charles Herbert Lightoller was handing over the watch on Titanic’s bridge to First Officer Murdoch, who was on watch at the time of the collision at 11.40pm, they apparently both noted that the stars seemed to be setting on the horizon and they noticed that the air was unusually clear and they thought that they could see a remarkably long way, which, in the miraging conditions, they could:
First Officer William McMaster Murdoch, who was on watch when Titanic collided © Mary Evans Picture Library
CHL455. I say, did you talk with Mr. Murdoch about the iceberg situation when you left the watch?
- No, sir.
CHL456. Did he ask you anything about it?
- No, sir.
CHL457. What was said between you?
- We remarked on the weather, about its being calm, clear. We remarked the distance we could see. We seemed to be able to see a long distance. Everything was very clear. We could see the s
tars setting down to the horizon.
“I should keep my course and maintain my speed”
Even with a soft horizon, one can expect to spot an iceberg at sea on a clear night within plenty of time to avoid it, as per the following testimonies. The first is from polar explorer Sir Earnest Shackleton, who had a great deal of experience of navigating in ice:
25015. I want you to help the Court with your views, as a result of your experience, first of all with regard to the visibility of ice in clear weather. Take icebergs first?
- That entirely depends on the height of the iceberg. Take an iceberg of about 80 feet high, and the ordinary type of iceberg that has not turned over, you could see that in clear weather about ten to twelve miles.
25016. At night?
- Not at night, no. I would say, providing it was an ordinary berg, about five miles on a clear night.
Because icebergs can normally always be seen in time to avoid them, all transatlantic liner captains kept to course and full speed in ice, in clear weather, even on flat-calm, moonless nights, even when field ice had been reported on their track:
Captain John Pritchard: 25170. I believe your last command was the "Mauretania," was it not?
- Yes.
25172. I believe for 18 years you have commanded Cunard steamships sailing between Liverpool and New York?