The Iceberg That Sank the Titanic Natural World

On April 14th 1912,

two giants were on a collision course in the North Atlantic.

One was a natural leviathan, 15,000 years in the making.

The other, a massive luxury liner, whose very name, Titanic,

symbolised the colossal confidence of the age.

But even though ice conquered steel,

the iceberg became a mere bit part in the Titanic legend.

The chances of colliding with a berg this far into the transatlantic shipping lanes were tiny.

So where did it come from and how did it get there?

Scientists have worked out how icebergs are conceived

and how, like an animal presence, they live out their lives on the ocean.

Now for the first time, we retrace its 4000 mile journey,

reveal the monumental forces that shaped it,

and recreate the last moments of one of the most deadly natural destroyers on the high seas.

This is the untold story of the most famous iceberg in history.

The rusting hulk of the Titanic continues to haunt us.

It's a catastrophe which has been minutely documented and scrutinised.

But the only record we have of the iceberg that sank her

is a single photograph taken the cold morning after.

Eye witness reports vary.

Some say it was 30 metres high and 100 metres wide.

What we know for certain is that it was a long way from home.

The collision site was about the same latitude as New York,

so how did that huge lump of ice travel so far south?

The International Ice Patrol went into action the year after the disaster.

Every iceberg season since, March to July, they've tracked bergs over the North Atlantic.

They've done more than just protect ships.

They've uncovered the secret life of the most infamous berg of all.

Each iceberg is unique, a freshwater ice sculpture

moulded by its individual journey around the polar seas.

They float low in the water because of the sheer tonnage of ice.

That's why the tip of an iceberg is no measure of what lies beneath,

and why to this day they're such a danger to ships.

But they are notoriously difficult to keep tabs on.

Day by day they split, fracture and melt, changing their appearance completely.

Icebergs are masters of disguise.

The Titanic iceberg had its own secret history.

But the Ice Patrol has now traced where it came from.

'Yeah, looks like a berg at about eight miles.'

Thousands of miles due north of the collision site is Greenland.

85% of all icebergs found in the North Atlantic

come from massive ice fjords on Greenland's west coast,

like this one, at Ilulissat.

So much ice is travelling down this inlet that it completely covers the water surface...

..and it leads us to the biggest iceberg production line of them all.

Julian Dowdeswell, of the Scott Polar Research Institute

believes this 80 metre wall of mother ice is the most likely birthplace of the Titanic iceberg.

We're below the height of the ice cliffs on this six kilometre wide front of the ice stream.

It's incredibly spectacular to be able to look up at the ice itself

and the colours of blue and white that are mixed together.

At some places, it's completely evident that very recent calving has taken place,

that new icebergs have effectively just been born.

This single wall of ice produces more icebergs

than anywhere else in the northern hemisphere -

thousands each year, fed from an ice basin the size of England.

Icebergs from here take about three years to reach the North Atlantic.

The iceberg that sank the Titanic would have calved in 1909,

just as work began on the ship itself.

But in fact, this was not the beginning of the iceberg's story.

The ice cliff was its birthplace, but it had been conceived 15,000 years earlier,

back in the Stone Age, before man had ever taken to the sea.

Julian has traced back to where it all began -

400 miles inland from the Ilulissat ice cliff.

I'm standing close to the centre of the Greenland ice sheet.

Beneath me is about 3000 metres of ice

and looking into the distance, I can see nothing but white.

The iceberg that ended up sinking the Titanic

would have begun its life here as a snowflake.

How could a harmless snowflake become capable of ripping open a steel hull?

The snow that falls here is at first fluffy and not particularly dense.

As it compacts with depth it becomes a third of its former size.

Tens of metres below the surface, it becomes so dense it turns to solid glacial ice.

Bubbles become trapped within it.

Each bubble holds captive a breath of its conception air.

A record of the polar atmosphere that it will carry for 15,000 years,

to be released by an iceberg in the North Atlantic.

But how does this rock solid ice transform into bergs?

The agent of change is melt water.

Through countless artic summers,

melt water pools on the surface of the ice sheet, before boring down into its heart.

In this frozen underworld, glaciologists have discovered a labyrinth of passageways

cutting right through the ice sheet.

They are fault lines, which orchestrate how an iceberg will form.

The walls of future icebergs in frozen suspension.

Centuries before the Titanic was even conceived on the drawing board,

the blueprint of its nemesis had been laid down.

But the developing iceberg was still frozen to the Greenland bedrock,

barely moving for nearly 15,000 years.

So how did this terrifying beast ever get to the sea?

In some places, the earth's inner heat warms the base of the ice sheet

and the lowest layers of ice begin to melt.

This releases the ice mass from the bedrock.

This is how the Titanic iceberg,

and all the other bergs around it, were set in motion.

Ripped apart by the strains of movement, crevasses open up.

Scars and weaknesses the iceberg would carry for the rest of its life.

At a remarkable four miles a year, top speed for an ice stream,

it slid down the vast Ilulissat drainage basin.

Under its own weight, it ground up the bedrock,

absorbing the fragments into its great bulk.

It would have covered this last 200 miles to the coast

in less than 50 years.

Eventually, the vast Ilulissat ice stream narrows into the fjord.

So much ice is drawn through this bottleneck, and at such speed,

that the sea in front of the calving front is always choked.

In 1909, as the Titanic iceberg was accelerating towards the end of its production line,

work on the ship was just beginning.

Two thousand miles away, at the Harland and Wolff shipyards in Belfast,

the largest keel ever was being laid down.

In both size and luxury, this liner was intended to be Titanic.

Plate by plate, rivet by rivet,

40,000 tonnes of steel were assembled within the largest dry dock in the world.

The Ilulissat glacier, meanwhile, was creating a rival giant.

Only the mightiest icebergs make it down to the shipping lanes.

In 1909, Ilulissat was producing just one or two of these mega bergs each year.

Sometime in the summer months,

one such megalith would have started towards its date with destiny.

Perhaps a mile long,

it might have displaced a billion tonnes of sea water.

It would have dwarfed even the Titanic.

In her dry dock, she was being armour plated with inch thick steel,

the finest grade of the day.

But even the strongest steel would be no match

for the millions of tonnes of icy reality ahead.

Man's confidence in a new age of technology

was embodied in this one ship.

Perhaps, for the first time, we became complacent about the power of the natural world.

More than anything, the Titanic's owners wanted to out-class their transatlantic rival.

Harland and Wolff worked at double-time.

While the Titanic project went full steam ahead,

the mega berg was going nowhere.

Up near the calving ice front, the icebergs are on the very first part of their journey.

It's a slow journey to begin with,

because they're jammed together in this great amalgam of icebergs and brash ice.

It would have taken the mega berg over a year to edge its way down the 40 mile fjord.

While the Titanic ship rose up above the Belfast skyline,

the massive berg was under assault,

battered and eroded by the relentless jostling of other bergs.

Within this first year of life,

the mega berg would have halved its birth weight.

But it was still a giant, capable of turning lesser bergs upside down.

That's when they reveal the grit they've scoured from the Greenland bedrock.

But where the Ilulissat fjord meets the sea,

the mega berg would have been stopped in its tracks.

Although the fjord is very deep, its mouth is very shallow.

The huge keels of mega bergs can easily run aground here.

The Titanic iceberg was stuck,

but with other bergs backing up behind it, something had to give.

It was an unstable situation which, even today,

can unleash a phenomenal amount of power.

Living just a few hundred metres from these brooding giants

is the Inuit fishing community of Ilulissat.

Here, a home video captured the moment when a modern day mega berg reached its tipping point.

Two fishermen, Eli and Soren, had a lucky escape.

'We sailed from Ilulissat a little late that day,

'other fishermen had already gone.

'I think it is the reason why we're still alive.

'We didn't hear anything because we were sailing fast.

'Normally you can hear signs when an iceberg is going to roll.

'Eli panicked and screamed and wanted to cut us free.

'Afterwards we sailed as fast as we could.

'We could see the big waves, it was dangerous.

'It was unbelievable.'

The rolling iceberg produced a terrifying tsunami.

Eli and Soren escaped it by heading out to sea.

No records exist from 1910,

but perhaps the Titanic iceberg had claimed lives even before it had left the Greenland coast.

By rolling, it had lifted itself over the fjord mouth.

It was free.

The mega berg was by now only a half a mile across,

but it had reached the open ocean.

Just beyond the fjord is remarkable evidence of the route the mega berg may have taken,

as it passed through Greenland's coastal waters.

While at the sea surface, icebergs seem to be drifting serenely out of the fjord,

at depth, it's quite a different story.

Where icebergs impact the seafloor with their deep keels,

ploughing takes place and in fact,

the whole of the seafloor is a series of cross cut plough marks.

We have evidence here...

from side scan sonar records.

It reveals that almost the whole of the Greenland shelf

is being cut to ribbons by the actions of many, many iceberg keels.

Could our iceberg have passed this way?

The largest iceberg scour marks or plough marks, on the seafloor

are up to about 20 kilometres in length,

several hundred metres wide and between five and ten metres deep.

If the iceberg that sank the Titanic crossed this bit of the Greenland shelf,

we may even be looking at the plough mark produced by that iceberg.

Perhaps, sometime in late 1910,

the massive berg left its calling card

in the muddy sediments along Greenland's west coast.

In Belfast, the Titanic's pioneering hull had been completed.

Now it was her turn to slip into the water for the first time.

Both giants had broken their ties with the land.

But while the Titanic was anchored, ready to be fitted out,

the iceberg took an unexpected turn.

Ships are buffeted by wind and waves,

but big icebergs with vast keels

are pushed around by deep ocean currents.

In 1911, the Titanic iceberg would have been picked up on the powerful West Greenland current

and instead of drifting towards the shipping lanes

and the fatal collision site, it went the other way.

It headed north.

In these early stages of its journey,

it would have seemed no threat to anyone.

But icebergs are very unpredictable.

Claude Daley, ice engineer at Memorial University in Newfoundland,

has studied how young icebergs change personality at sea.

When my oldest daughter was in high school, she was looking for a science project to work on.

I suggested that she come and do a test on ice

and we wondered, well, what could she do on ice?

And I said, "Why don't we make some small icebergs

"and see how they melt?"

We just did tests. The blocks of ice were just floated in water

and we watched to see what happened.

The water melts the bottom of the iceberg.

The waves lap against the iceberg around the waterline

and a kind of waistline is formed.

And then the sun melts the top of the ice

and you get water flowing off the top of the iceberg.

With these different melting processes,

what you find is you get pieces of ice that are either hanging over

if they're above water or there's a tonne of ice sticking out below the waterline.

There's this tremendous weight pushing down

and the buoyant forces from the water pushing up

and that's potential energy.

They look so peaceful when they're just sitting there.

It would take an extremely large explosive device

to come close to the amount of locked in energy in an iceberg.

Like a coiled spring, an iceberg can unleash this energy at any moment.

Extraordinarily, these tensions, deep within its frame, have a voice.

As seawater forces through its crevasses and fissures,

its creaking body resonates.

Since each berg is a unique shape and size,

the Titanic iceberg would have had its own sounds.

But it might not have reached full voice until the autumn of 1911,

when the Greenland current dragged it north into the Arctic,

and a world of sea ice.

Sea ice can be over a metre thick.

The very largest bergs plough right through it,

but the knocks and blows they receive

cause veins of sea water deep within them to vibrate,

like the air in a set of organ pipes.

As they bump their way through the thick sea ice,

each iceberg resonates to its own music.

The Titanic iceberg may have been a force for good up here -

as much a life-giver as a life-taker,

for when giant icebergs get dragged onwards by the Greenland current,

they break open natural sea lanes.

They also stir up nutrients,

which allow sea mammals such as beluga and narwhal to feed in their wake.

WHALES CHATTER

Perhaps the whales are also responding to the extraordinary symphony playing around them.

Icebergs are part of the delicate ecology in these frozen seas.

Leaving lesser bergs to freeze in the pack ice,

the icy megalith drifted on into its middle age

and the long, dark Arctic winter of 1911.

Back in Belfast, through those same winter months,

finishing touches were added to the Titanic's interior.

No expense was spared to create this floating palace.

The castle of ice was now 3,000 miles from the shipping lanes,

and an encounter with the world's largest liner couldn't have seemed more improbable.

But in the new year, everything changed.

At the polar ice cap, the West Greenland current curls,

and turns south.

It dragged the Titanic iceberg with it,

down the north-eastern coast of Canada.

Tickets for the Titanic's maiden voyage were going on sale,

just as a deadly armada was unleashed from the natural world.

The weathered surfaces of each berg have their own tale to tell.

The chips and fractures read like a history of their individual journeys around the polar seas.

They've been sculpted into icy skyscrapers.

Even now, the Titanic iceberg would have been huge.

The above-water ice alone would have rivalled the Colosseum in size.

Early in 1912, as many as 10,000 battle-scarred giants

may have emerged from their polar expedition.

The chances of the ship meeting the berg had just risen dramatically.

Every day, the Titanic iceberg would have been moving 12 miles further south.

There were just eight weeks to go before its meeting with the world's most famous ship.

On the other side of the ocean, the Titanic was almost complete.

After a day of sea trials, on April 2nd,

it headed down to Southampton to prepare for its maiden voyage.

The iceberg's route south was far from plain sailing.

A ragged, rocky shelf fingering out from the Newfoundland coast snares many passing icebergs.

Stranded, nearly 2,000 miles from home,

many Greenland icebergs end up melting along this coastline.

The Titanic iceberg could easily have met a similar fate,

but the deep Labrador current pulled it wide of the coast,

and continued to control its journey south.

By now, it was a weathered old beast, and the warming temperatures were taking their toll.

The ancient snowflakes at its centre were still at minus 20 degrees centigrade,

but its surface was being eaten away by sun and sea,

and this would change its behaviour radically.

When you get an old iceberg, they're the least stable.

If you just tap them with your finger,

maybe nothing will happen.

Maybe everything will happen.

The experiment with my daughter...

what we found was with a cube of ice floating in water,

it starts off quite stable.

But then, as the bottom melts off the ice block,

it doesn't take long before the ice is unstable,

and it rolls on its side.

What's now under the water is a different shape, and it melts off,

and then again, it rolls.

And there's a sequence of melting and rolling and melting and rolling,

and it got faster and faster and faster.

By the time the piece of ice was down to about the size of a baseball,

it was rolling constantly. It was alive.

The iceberg's life was unravelling too.

Now less than a tenth of its original size,

it was probably rolling over every three or four days,

and melting fast.

It had, at most, two weeks of life left

as it moved towards the Grand Banks.

The Banks are a shallow area of sea,

but scything through them is a deep trough.

The Labrador current funnels the icebergs down this channel,

giving it the name "Iceberg Alley".

At its southern end, it drags the icebergs right into the transatlantic shipping lanes.

Only 1% of all bergs make it this far south.

And even at this late stage, the collision might never have happened.

2,000 miles to the east, in Southampton, the Titanic's owners,

White Star Line, were deciding whether to delay the crossing.

A national coal strike was in progress,

and there simply wasn't enough coal at the port to get the liner to New York.

But the company was so keen to get their star ship underway

that they borrowed coal from the holds of other vessels.

On schedule, around midday on 10th April, 1912,

the Titanic and her 2,227 passengers steamed into the English Channel.

Seven lucky passengers were dropped off in Queenstown in Ireland,

and the Titanic headed into the Atlantic Ocean.

Two days into their journey, they received several warnings about the large amount of ice ahead.

Captain Smith adjusted his heading to the south.

In any other year, that might have been far enough,

but 1912 was a bad year for bergs.

As the diners in the opulent state rooms finished their evening meal on the night of April 14th,

the stokers brought another of the ship's 29 boilers on-stream.

They were steaming through the darkness of the North Atlantic at a cracking 21 knots.

There's a simple reason why the lookout wouldn't have been able to spot anything ahead...

until too late.

Tonight is a night like the night the Titanic hit the iceberg.

There's no moon.

It's fairly calm. We can see a few lights in the ocean here tonight,

and it's the reflection from those lights that let us see objects.

But if we were the only light in the ocean,

then the light would be going out from us.

The Titanic itself was a sea of light.

Like a city, it lights up the neighbourhood -

you can't see outside of it.

Of course, their eyes were accustomed to the light onboard.

It was much more than the "nothing" that was out around them.

If we were on the iceberg, we would've spotted the Titanic coming.

But the reverse was not true.

In a calm sea, there would have been no wave action around the base of the iceberg.

It would have been completely black.

Modern vessels have radar - they didn't have radar.

Modern vessels have searchlights that reach miles ahead.

90% of an iceberg,

or 90% of an ice cube in your glass, is below the water level.

And so if you can see an iceberg,

you're just seeing 10% of it.

They would've needed to get so close to it

that some of the lights of the vessel shone on the white ice

and reflected back.

It would've just completely surprised them.

Iceberg, right ahead!

-Thank you.

-Their first instinct was to turn.

-Iceberg, right ahead!

-Hard a' starboard!

It was the worst decision they could have made.

I've been on ships that have hit ice head-on and come to a sudden stop.

As the bow of the ship is crushing and crumpling,

that acts as a buffer, as a cushion.

Had the Titanic hit head-on,

the ship would've come to a shuddering stop,

most people would've been knocked over.

China's all over the place, pots in the kitchen are on the floor,

boiling water everywhere.

They would clean up the mess, seal off the forepeak,

and carry on their way, and they would have got home again.

Today, we would say it's obvious - train people to hit icebergs head-on.

But it isn't a natural thing, to run into a wall at high speed.

It isn't natural.

It's completely understandable that they tried to avoid a major accident.

'Ships turn very slowly,

'and the Titanic turned particularly slowly -

'it had a relatively small rudder for the size of the vessel.'

It would have been agonising to wait for this large ship

to slowly take on a new heading.

While that was occurring, of course,

the iceberg was coming closer and closer,

and it would have all been in a kind of slow motion.

The order was given to put the engines in reverse.

I think that was a bad idea, I think that was a really bad idea.

The rudders work because they have high speed flow over them.

It seems to me it was done out of a kind of panic, that's all I can think,

because those two actions don't make sense together.

'And instead of flooding one part of the vessel which no passenger ever went to,

'they ripped open big parts of the vessel,

'flooding the engines, flooding the cargo spaces,

'flooding parts of the vessel that they needed to stay dry'

if it was going to stay upright and stay floating in the water.

This meeting, 15,000 years in the making, lasted seconds.

A blink of an eye in the iceberg's long lifetime.

Even a rigid steel hull is but paper to half a million tonnes of solid ice.

A fatal oversight, which cost over 1,500 lives.

While news of the tragedy tapped along the wires,

the iceberg floated on.

Some see an incriminating scrape of paint on its surface.

But all we can really tell from its appearance

is that it would have been rolling continually, highly unstable.

A berg that was in its own death throes.

Warmer Gulf Stream water was eating voraciously into its heart.

The ancient leviathan had been reduced to a shard of ice.

Titanic had been expected to make many journeys through these waters,

but the iceberg's maiden voyage was always to be its last.

In late April 1912,

barely a week or two after the Titanic's demise,

over 1,000 miles from its birthplace,

the last piece of the iceberg disappeared into the Atlantic Ocean.

Some way from the rusting hull of the Titanic,

there would be a scattering of soil

where the last of the iceberg's rocky sediments

was finally released into the ocean.

The iceberg was remembered as a destructive force,

but was the tragedy that befell the liner

as much to do with our own over-reaching ambition?

The disaster made us pay attention to icebergs.

In the decades since, fear of them has turned to wonder.

We've come to appreciate them as remarkable and beautiful natural objects.

More recently, we've learned that they,

and the currents which transport them,

play a crucial role in regulating our climate.

There is a delicate balance between the amount of ice melting from the Greenland ice sheet

and the way in which currents flow through the Atlantic ocean.

Global warming is threatening this balance.

Scientists predict that a flood of polar melt water

could change the salinity of the North Atlantic,

weaken the Gulf Stream,

and bring a bit of the Arctic permanently to European shores.

Preserving the world's polar regions has never been more important.

Every year, the International Ice Patrol honours the lost souls of the Titanic

with a wreath drop over the wreck site.

'It is with great respect and reverence

'that we commemorate this anniversary of the sinking of the RMS Titanic on April 15th, 1912.

'We remember the over 1,500 souls who perished on that fateful day.

'On behalf of the United States Coastguard,

'and the family and friends of those who perished with the sinking of the Titanic, we cast these wreaths.'

Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd - 2006

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