Titanic sank due to enormous uncontrollable fire, not iceberg, experts claim

From The Independant by Rachael Pells

Rarely seen images of the Titanic before it left Southampton have furthered researchers’ theory that a fire may have been the root cause of the 1912 disaster

The sinking of the RMS Titanic may have been caused by an enormous fire on board, not by hitting an iceberg in the North Atlantic, experts have claimed, as new evidence has been published to support the theory.
More than 1,500 passengers lost their lives when the Titanic sank on route to New York from Southampton in April 1912.
While the cause of the disaster has long been attributed to the iceberg, fresh evidence has surfaced of a fire in the ship’s hull, which researchers say burned unnoticed for almost three weeks leading up to the collision.

While experts have previously acknowledged the theory of a fire on board, new analysis of rarely seen photographs has prompted researchers to blame the fire as the primary cause of the ship’s demise.
Journalist Senan Molony, who has spent more than 30 years researching the sinking of the Titanic, studied photographs taken by the ship’s chief electrical engineers before it left Belfast shipyard.
Mr Maloney said he was able to identify 30-foot-long black marks along the front right-hand side of the hull, just behind where the ship’s lining was pierced by the iceberg.
He said: “We are looking at the exact area where the iceberg stuck, and we appear to have a weakness or damage to the hull in that specific place, before she even left Belfast”.
Experts subsequently confirmed the marks were likely to have been caused by a fire started in a three-storey high fuel store behind one of the ship’s boiler rooms.

A team of 12 men attempted to put out the flames, but it was too large to control, reaching temperatures of up to 1000 degrees Celsius.
Subsequently, when the Titanic struck ice, the steel hull was weak enough for the ship’s lining to be torn open.
Officers on board were reportedly under strict instruction from J Bruce Ismay, president of the company that built the Titanic, not to mention the fire to any of the ship’s 2,500 passengers.
Presenting his research in a Channel 4 documentary, Titanic: The New Evidence, broadcast on New Year’s Day, Mr Maloney also claims the ship was reversed into its berth in Southampton to prevent passengers from seeing damage made to the side of the ship by the ongoing fire.
Mr Molony said: “The official Titanic inquiry branded [the sinking] as an act of God. This isn’t a simple story of colliding with an iceberg and sinking.
“It’s a perfect storm of extraordinary factors coming together: fire, ice and criminal negligence.
“Nobody has investigated these marks before. It totally changes the narrative. We have metallurgy experts telling us that when you get that level of temperature against steel it makes it brittle, and reduces its strength by up to 75 per cent.
“The fire was known about, but it was played down. She should never have been put to sea.”

 History Channel - Titanic Real Story - Discovery History Documentary 2017

In 2008, Ray Boston, an expert with more than 20 years of research into the Titanic’s journey, said he believed the coal fire began during speed trials as much as 10 days prior to the ship leaving Southampton.
He said the fire had potential to cause “serious explosions” below decks before it would reach New York.
An inquiry into the disaster, presented to Parliament in 1912, described the ship as travelling at “high speed” through dangerous icy waters, giving the crew little opportunity to avoid the fatal collision.

Links :

• CNN : Did a coal fire sink the Titanic?
• HuffingtonPost : New Evidence Suggests Massive Fire Helped Sink The Titanic
• The Inquisitr : Irish investigator Selan Molony claims Titanic fire weakened hull, resulting in fateful 1912 sinking
• GeoGarage blog :Challenge to Titanic sinking theory / Robert Ballard, discoverer of the Titanic is mapping ... / Titanic items to be sold 100 years after sinking / New images of Titanic wreck revealed / Titanic threat: why do ships still hit icebergs? / First map of entire Titanic wreck site sheds new light on ... / New expedition to Titanic site will create 3D map of wreck / Her tale will go on: Titanic survivor's story sold at auction 

New technologies bring marine archaeology treasures to light

Three autonomous underwater vehicles searched for wrecks last year at Marzamemi, off the Sicilian coast.

Photograph: Salvo Emma/Courtesy of Sunrise

From The Guardian by Ian Sample

Robotic submarines and ‘internet of underwater things’ to transform hunt for sunken cities and ancient shipwrecks

No one knows what happened at Atlit-Yam.
The ancient village appeared to be thriving until 7000BC.
The locals kept cattle, caught fish and stored grain.
They had wells for fresh water, stone houses with paved courtyards.
Community life played out around an impressive monument: seven half-tonne stones that stood in a semicircular embrace around a spring where people came to drink.
Then one day, life ended.

 Not far off the coast of the village of Atlit in the Mediterranean Sea, near Haifa, lies the submerged ruins of the ancient Neolithic site of Atlit Yam.

The prehistoric settlement, which dates back to the 7th millennium BC, has been so well preserved by the sandy seabed that a mysterious stone circle still stands as it was first erected, and dozens of human skeletons lay undisturbed in their graves.

Atlit Yam is one of the oldest and largest sunken settlements ever found and sheds new light on the daily lives of its ancient inhabitants.

Today, Atlit Yam lies between 8 – 12 metres beneath sea level and covered an area of 40,000 square meters.

The village that once sat on the Mediterranean coast now lies 10 metres beneath the waves off Israel’s shore.
It was inundated when sea levels rose at the end of the last ice age.
But Atlit-Yam was destroyed before then, and swiftly, perhaps by a tsunami.
Buried under sand at the bottom of the sea, it now ranks as the largest and best preserved prehistoric settlement ever found on the seafloor.
Human skeletons still lie there in graves, undisturbed.

For marine archaeologists, Atlit-Yam is a trove from the Neolithic world.
Research on the buildings, tools and the remains of past lives has revealed how the bustling village once worked.
“It looks as though it was inhabited until the day it was submerged,” said Benedetto Allotta, head of industrial engineering at the University of Florence.
But for all the secrets the site has shared, it is only one window into a lost world.
For a fuller picture, researchers need more sunken settlements.
The hard part is finding them.
In January, work will start on a new project to transform the search for sunken cities, ancient shipwrecks and other subsea curiosities.
Led by Italian researchers, Archeosub will build a new generation of robotic submarines, or autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs), for marine archaeologists.
“You can find plenty of human settlements not far from the coast,” Allotta said.
“In the Mediterranean there will be a lot more Atlit-Yams waiting to be explored and studied.”

 Researchers from University of Porto preparing to ready to launch an AUV.

Photograph: Marco Merola/Courtesy of Sunrise

The goal of Archeosub is to put sophisticated AUVs in the hands of cash-strapped researchers.
That, in part, means turning the costly, heavy technology of the military and oil industries into far cheaper and lighter robots.
They must be affordable for archaeological organisations and light enough to launch by hand from a small boat, or even the shore, rather than from a winch on a large research vessel.
Slashing the cost and weight is only the start.
The team behind Archeosub has begun to make the AUVs smarter too.
When thrown overboard, the submarines can become part of an “internet of underwater things” which brings the power of wifi to the deep.
Once hooked up, the AUVs can talk to each other and, for example, work out the most efficient way to survey a site, or find particular objects on the seabed.
Field tests show the approach can work.
When cargo ships near Porto in northern Portugal lose containers overboard, AUVs can be deployed to find the missing goods.
And in a trial last year, Allotta’s group sent three AUVs to search for wrecks at Marzamemi, off the Sicilian coast.
The site is the final resting place of a Roman ship, known as the “church wreck”, which sank while ferrying pre-formed parts of marble and breccia for an early Christian church in the 6th century AD. “We used the AUVs to pass through and look for new ruins,” Allotta said.
“We could do a reconstruction of the area, where old Roman ships sank while bringing marble columns to Italy,” he said.

 The underwater archaeological site of Marzamemi, Sicily.

The site is the final resting place of a Roman ship which sank while ferrying marble and breccia for an early Christian church in the 6th century AD.

Photograph: Salvo Emma/Courtesy of Sunrise

Creating an internet beneath the waves is no breeze.
Slip under the surface and the electromagnetic waves used in wifi networks travel only centimetres.
Instead, a more complex mix of technologies is called for.
Acoustic waves, which are affected by depth, temperature, salinity and surface wind, are used to communicate over long distances underwater.
At close range, AUVs can share data over light beams.
But more creative solutions are also envisaged, where an AUV working on the seabed offloads data to a second which then surfaces and beams it home by satellite link.
Work is underway on AUVs that can beam pictures from the seabed over acoustic waves, and dock with others that charge them up.
Surface buoys that receive GPS signals tell the AUVs where they are.
“If you want to build an internet of underwater things, you cannot use the technology we have developed for the terrestrial world,” said Chiara Petrioli, a computer engineer who leads the work under the Sunrise project at Rome University.
“You have to be smarter.”
David Lane, a professor of autonomous engineering at Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh, has created a marine version of Dropbox for the underwater internet of things.
It allows AUVs to share information from seafloor scans and other data.
So if an AUV on a first pass survey spies an intriguing object on the seabed, it can share the coordinates with a nearby AUV that carries better cameras and sonar, and arrange for a closer inspection once it has left the area.

“The use of these vehicles has huge potential for marine archaeology,” Lane said.
“There’s a lot of history wrapped up in what’s lying on the seabed.”
One site where Allotta plans to deploy the new AUVs is the Gulf of Baratti off the coast of Tuscany. In 1974, a remarkable shipwreck was discovered there in 18 metres of water.
More than a merchant ship, the 2000-year-old vessel was a travelling medical emporium.
More than 100 wooden vials were found on board, along with other ancient medical supplies, including tin containers of tablets that may have been dissolved and used as eyewash.
Other Roman ships went down in the waters, shedding cargoes of olive oil and wine held in huge terracotta pots called dolia.
Often it is only the dolia that remain, the wooden ships lost, or at least buried, under silt.
Allotta hopes to have the first test results from the Archeosub project in the summer.
“Right now, we don’t have the right technology to give to archaeologists,” he said.
“But we are close.”

Happy New Year

GeoGarage presents its best wishes for a happy, prosperous and peaceful 2017.
We are grateful for having you in 2016, and we look forward to serving you during this New Year. 

Thank you for working with us in 2017.

Exciting things are coming up next year. Stay Tuned! :)

Pretty far North

PRETTY FAR NORTH from Pictionary Productions

In spring of 2016, me and a couple of friends decided to head up to no-mans-land

above the arctic circle to explore, sail, fish & chase some spring slush.

The CIA is celebrating its cartography division’s 75th anniversary by sharing declassified maps

President Roosevelt and OSS globe

From The Smithsonian by Danny Lewis

Decades of once-secret maps are now freely available online

As much as James Bond is defined by his outlandish gadgets, one of the most important tools for real-life spies is actually much less flashy: maps.
Whether used to gather information or plan an attack, good maps are an integral part of the tradecraft of espionage.
Now, to celebrate 75 years of serious cartography, the Central Intelligence Agency has declassified and put decades of once-secret maps online.

1956 Antarctica claims

These days, the C.I.A. and other intelligence agencies rely more on digital mapping technologies and satellite images to make its maps, but for decades it relied on geographers and cartographers for planning and executing operations around the world.
Because these maps could literally mean the difference between life and death for spies and soldiers alike, making them as accurate as possible was paramount, Greg Miller reports for National Geographic.
“During [the 1940s], in support of the military’s efforts in World War II...cartographers pioneered many map production and thematic design techniques, including the construction of 3D map models,” the C.I.A. writes in a statement.

1958 Chinas Offshore Islands

At the time, cartographers and mapmakers had to rely on existing maps, carefully replicating information about enemy terrain in pen on large translucent sheets of acetate.
The final maps were made by stacking these sheets on top of one another according to what information was needed, then photographed and reproduced at a smaller size, Miller reports.
All of this was done under the watchful eye of the then-26-year-old Arthur H. Robinson, the Cartography Center’s founder.

Though World War II-era intelligence services like the Office of the Coordinator of Information and the Office of Strategic Services eventually morphed into the C.I.A. as we know it today, the Cartography Center was a constant element of the United States’ influence abroad.
Looking through the collection of declassified maps is like looking into a series of windows through which government officials and intelligence agents viewed the world for decades, Allison Meier reports for Hyperallergic.
From the early focus on Nazi Germany and the Japanese Empire, the maps show shifting attention towards the Soviet Union, Vietnam and the Middle East, to name just a few examples.

 President Kennedy 1961 map

As interesting as these maps are to look at, it’s sobering to remember that they played a major role in shaping global politics of the 20th century.
These were the documents that U.S. government officials relied on for decades, whether it was predicting global trade in the 1950s or preparing for the Invasion of the Bay of Pigs in Cuba in the 1960s.

 1963 Cuba Soviet forces

Intelligence briefings may more often be done digitally these days, but whatever medium a map is made in, knowing where you are going remains critical to understanding—and influencing—world affairs.

Links :

• FlikR : CIA gallery photos of cartography tools