The Iceberg That Sunk The Titanic
Four days into her maiden voyage from Southampton to New York City, the RMS Titanic hits an iceberg. Two hours & forty minutes later she's gone, along with 1500 people. We all know the details of the sinking ship, but what of the iceberg?
It certainly was the elder of the two, by about 30 centuries. Born as falling snow on Greenland's west coast, it traveled further west towards the sea, compressing into dense ice. After calving away from the glacier, it most likely traveled from Baffin Bay to the Davis Strait, to the Labrador Sea, to its rapid demise in the North Atlantic.
The iceberg was remarkable in that it was found about 5,000 miles South of the Arctic Circle, which puts it in the 1% of the up to 30,000 icebergs calved each year by Greenland glaciers to even reach the Atlantic.
While 28-degree water proved quickly fatal to passengers, it wasn't enough to keep the iceberg solid for long. With a calving-to-melting life expectancy averaging 2-3 years, the iceberg probably left Greenland 1910 or 1911, melting back to the sea rapidly.
One might think that's a lot to know about a long-melted chunk of ice, but it gets better when we discuss what are probably the only known before & after photographs of the actual iceberg that struck the Titanic:
Within one or all of the photos, is it likely we have a mugshot of the culprit responsible for such a disaster? Though to be fair, it was there first..