Scientists find wreckage of ship that tried to warn Titanic of iceberg | Hacker News Reader

Scientists find wreckage of ship that tried to warn Titanic of iceberg

cnn.com

82 pointsantimora37 comments

https://web.archive.org/web/20220928220925/https://www.cnn.c...

> The Mesaba continued as a merchant ship until it was torpedoed by a German submarine while in convoy in 1918. Twenty people, including the ship's commander, died.

For some reason I read the title thinking that both ships sank that night. Apparently this one survived until WW1.

Same for the Britannic, Titanic's sister ship that was converted into a hospital ships and then torpedoed (or mined?) and sank faster than her sister.

Violet Jessop [1] survived both!

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Violet_Jessop

And the collision of the RMS Olympic (the first of the three in that family) with the HMS Hawke. As did the coal stoker Arthur Priest

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthur_John_Priest

Reminds me of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unsinkable_Sam

Glad I'm not the only one. Was thinking my memory can't be _that_ bad haha.

Right, this is an incredible clever headline. I visualized a ship, screaming at the top of their lungs, but sinking just before getting within earshot

"tried to warn" seems a bit misleading to me. It seems that it successfully warned the Titanic, as did several other ships, but the Titanic didn't do anything with the warnings. It maintained full speed per standard practice, believing that ice formed little danger to large vessels (per Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Titanic).

The phrase is often used when something bad happens after someone urged caution and was ignored.

Recipient “didn’t want to hear it”: https://news.yahoo.com/us-intelligence-tried-warn-ukraine-10...

Unfortunately, it’s also used when the message never makes it to the recipient: https://www.nj.com/union/2022/05/nj-cop-tried-to-warn-gang-m...

A little Titanic factoid: The novella "Wreck of the Titan" written by Morgan Robertson and published as Futility in 1898, and revised as The Wreck of the Titan in 1912. It features a fictional British ocean liner Titan that sinks in the North Atlantic after striking an iceberg. The Titan and its sinking are famous for similarities to the passenger ship RMS Titanic and its sinking 14 years later.

"Biggest ship in the world" title

Written before the RMS Titanic was even conceptualized

The fictional ship sank in April in the North Atlantic 400 miles far away from Newfoundland, and there were not enough lifeboats for all the passengers. (all same as Titanic)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wreck_of_the_Titan:_Or,_Fu...

> Its exact location was unknown for more than a century, but scientists have now found the wreck of the Mesaba by using multibeam sonar. The offshore surveying tool uses sound waves to enable seabed mapping in such detail that the superstructure can be revealed on sonar images, allowing researchers at Bangor University and Bournemouth University in the UK to positively identify the shipwreck in the Irish Sea.

TIL, the radar is detailed enough to ID the ships without using a submarine.

Can it find MH370?

Interesting idea, though I suspect a ship of that size didn’t break up as much as MH370 probably did. This would make detection harder since the remaining pieces would be much smaller.

Yes. You have to be searching the area where the plane crashed though. So far they have only searched the area where the plane did not crash. Uncertainty in the final minutes of flight have contributed to making the job of locating any wreckage very difficult. The ocean is large and deep and finding something as small as a passenger jet is hard unless you can narrow the search area.

Well, maybe they should try searching where the plane did crash?

Perhaps it crashed outside of the environment.

I'm thinking the plane entered a portal to the future, and some fragments were sent back to make people in our timeline think it crashed.

PlaneOutOfBoundsException

into another environment... no no no the ship crashed beyond the environment; it's not in the environment. ...

(for the benefit of anyone who doesn't get how great a reference this is: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GgrX7uOZqHI)

They don't know where it crashed. Makes it hard to find.

Air France plane went down. They know where it went down and it still took them 2 years to locate it.

The ocean is a HUGE place.

You always find something in the last place you look.

I always find things in the first place i looked, because i didn't look properly.

On the contrary!

This clearly shows demonstrates that no one can ever say that you don't look good.

You're definitely a good looker.

I wonder how laterally a plane crash can move after it’s reached the surface of the ocean. Ie. Currents and general drift.

Bits of MH370 have been retrieved from Madagascar beaches. The body of the plane itself may have drifted many kilometers away from the point of impact as it sank but it doesn't matter since we have no idea where it first fell other than a general "southern Indian ocean"

They've used multibeam sonars among other types of sonars, without success.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MOjVq5szAoU

The range of sonars is quite limited and the ocean is huge. There's really no point in searching unless you have a good starting point.

> TIL, the radar is detailed enough to ID the ships without using a submarine.

Sonar, not radar.

There are other types of sonar which produce good images, such as side-scan sonar:

https://www.shipwreckworld.com/articles/side-scan-sonar-imag...

Even Garmin makes them for ridiculously low prices (compared to what I remembered from the 1990s).

The real question is how many other wreckages did they find along the way

273

I just hope that this sonar is not messing up with marine life and its communication/orientation.

Geez, why can't the article use the proper term "the bridge" instead of/that it could explain as "the main control center of the ship". I remember reading that to be readable to the average American, the news is written in fifth grade level English. In this case, it shows.

By contrast the BBC reported:

> The merchant vessel SS Mesaba was crossing the Atlantic in April 1912 and sent a wireless message to the Titanic but its warning never reached the bridge.

and included the multibeam sidescan image.

[BBC] https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-wales-63039737

It's nice to see my local university on HN.

Here's their article on the matter:

https://www.bangor.ac.uk/news/09/finding-the-ship-that-sent-...

More on the Mesaba (ex-Winifreda). [http://www.theyard.info/ships/ships.asp?entryid=319]

Anyone know a good tv documentary on the Titanic?

I wonder how long it will take to find the Malayan airlines plane

Reply on news.ycombinator.com