The “Titanic” film earned well over three billion dollars at the box office, making
it the third highest-grossing movie of all time. However, as I was watching it, a question
popped into my head. Why didn't people try climbing on the iceberg to get out of the
water? Because …it was too slippery. Okay, thanks
for joining me today on Bright Side…oh wait, there’s more? Right. Back to our story.
At first, this seemed to be an easy fix, but as I started to look into it, I found some
logistical problems that would make it more like a frozen nightmare than a frosty lifeboat.
Hm, a frozen nightmare. Does anyone else suddenly want to see Elsa fight Freddy Krueger? Nobody
steal that idea! I think I just found my ticket to Hollywood.
In the meantime, let's talk about slopes. Ice slopes to be specific. You probably don't
need me to tell you that an iceberg isn't just a giant ice cube in the ocean, but it's
essential to draw a distinction between an ice floe, and an iceberg. (We’ll save Ice
Capades for another time.) A floe, spelled F L O E, is a flat mass of
ice found drifting in the ocean. Much like icebergs, they're the result of Arctic ice
breaking away from a larger shelf. But that's pretty much where the similarities end. A
floe is low, flat, and relatively shallow, while an iceberg is none of those things.
You may have heard the expression “tip of the iceberg”. Well, the towering spire of
frozen water you know and fear is only a small part of the iceberg's mass. The bulk of an
iceberg is found under the water, and this is the part most dangerous to passing ships.
Ramming into a giant hunk of anything is never good, but when the damage is underwater, things
go from bad to worse pretty fast. Ice floes can be hazardous, but the concern
is that a ship might get pinned and crushed between two of them instead of sinking outright.
This is only a real possibility when close to or within the Arctic Circle. The Titanic
may have been in the North Atlantic, but not quite that far north.
No, the Titanic hit an iceberg, and if you look at any picture of an iceberg, you'll
see that they can get quite steep. Sure, some might be scalable, but others are nothing
but sheer cliffs of jagged ice. Best case, it would be like climbing a mountain; worst
case, a frozen cliffside. There are several images purported to show
the iceberg that did the deed, but the most likely culprit is this one here. Now, I don’t
know about you, but that doesn’t exactly strike me as an easy climb.
Now imagine trying to pull that off in the dark, using only your hands and maybe a bit
of rope, and surrounded by over a thousand other confused and freezing people. And don’t
imagine for a second that it would be an orderly evacuation either. Remember, while the lack
of lifeboats was a big problem for the Titanic, a much bigger one was the fact that more than
half left only partially full. If that could happen, do you really think
the crew would be able to maintain order while getting a small army’s worth of passengers
onto a slippery pile of ice? Would people even be willing to give it a chance?
Remember, the Titanic didn't sink the moment it made contact with the ice. It actually
took a full two hours and forty minutes to go under. While that would give the crew more
time to evacuate the passengers, the danger wasn't apparent the whole time. When the order
was delivered to don their life jackets, many treated it as a joke. When it came time to
board the lifeboats, many passengers were reluctant, believing themselves safer on the
big warm ship than the tiny open boats. That was part of the reason the first boats
out were among the emptiest. If people were that reluctant to board escape craft until
it was almost too late, how were the crew going to convince them to clamber atop a freezing
lump of ice? People wouldn’t start changing their tune
until much later, once the ship began to visibly tilt. Once that happens, it would be chaos
as people crowded the gangplank and struggled across the surface of the iceberg.
Making matters worse is that if too many people tried to cross the plank at once, it could
end up snapping. This wouldn’t only throw everyone into the freezing water, but they'd
also risk being crushed between the iceberg and the hull of the ship.
The lifeboats could be used to help with the evacuation, but presented their own problems.
If the people who took the gangplank would have trouble moving across the berg, scaling
the slopes from the surface of the water would be even more difficult.
And frankly, if you were on a lifeboat, would you want to trade it for a giant hunk of ice?
These are all big problems that would’ve made evacuating to the iceberg unfeasible,
and we haven't even gotten to the biggest one on the list: reaching it.
Didn’t see that one coming, did you? At first, this might seem strange. How can
you not be close enough to the thing you just crashed into? That’s like, the ultimate
level of proximity. Well, the Titanic didn’t exactly grind to
a halt the moment it hit the iceberg. As you might have guessed, the ship's helmsman had
been trying to steer away from the ice before the collision. Instead of ramming into the
iceberg head on, the Titanic merely grazed its side, swapping paint in history’s worst
fender-bender. Ironically, they might have been better off
with a front-on collision. While there would have still been flooding on the lower decks,
the water would have been confined to only a few of the compartments. The Titanic was
designed to stay afloat with up to four of the sixteen watertight compartments flooded.
The glancing blow caused a breach in six, which astute viewers will notice as being
two more than the maximum number. Curse you, math, you’ve struck again!
There’s also a possibility that the impact would’ve lifted the Titanic’s bow out
of the water. Either of these could’ve prevented the ship from sinking, or at least delayed
the inevitable by several additional hours. None of this is to say that we should think
any less of the Titanic’s captain for not steering directly into a giant lump of ice.
Lots of things are easy to come up with in hindsight but might not have been apparent
at the moment. Can you think of any other “obvious” solutions to historical problems
that would have been anything but? Why don't you let me know down in the comments?
Anyway, a glancing blow meant the Titanic wasn't stopped in its tracks. It's estimated
that the Titanic was clipping along at around 22 knots, about 24 miles per hour for landlubbers.
That might not seem very fast, but a 52,000-ton ship is going to have a lot of inertia to
overcome. In the almost three hours following the impact, the Titanic drifted at least another
mile and a half. In the middle of the night, it’s debatable
if you’d even be able to find the iceberg again, let alone attempt to ferry everyone
across. The captain would’ve had to steer his ship back to the iceberg, something that
might not have even been possible given the circumstances. If you were him, would you
waste your limited time sailing in circles? There are plenty of things that could’ve
been done to avoid or mitigate the Titanic disaster. Most of them, such as more lifeboats
and better emergency training, would have needed to occur long before the ship left
port. While escaping to the iceberg makes for an interesting idea, it wouldn’t necessarily
have been a good one. If anything, attempting it could have made the disaster even worse.
On that note, I’m off to start working on that Frozen Nightmare movie. I mean, it works
on so many levels! Hey, Let It Go! So , if you learned something new today, then
give the video a like and share it with a friend! And here are some other cool videos
I think you'll enjoy. Just click to the left or right, and stay on the Bright Side of life!