By Alasdair Wilkins, io9
Exactly one hundred years ago Sunday, an ocean liner struck a block of ice and sank in the North Atlantic. The story of the ocean liner has been told hundreds of times. This story is about the block of ice.
[partner id="io9"]The photos you see up top and down on the left are quite possibly the only known photographic evidence of the actual iceberg that struck the Titanic. Understandably, nobody had bothered to snap any photographs while the ship was actually sinking, so it's impossible to make an absolutely confirmed positive identification. But both photographs feature the telltale sign of a collision with a ship, and likely a recent one at that: a streak of red paint.
The photo up top was taken by the chief steward of the German ocean liner SS Prinz Adalbert, which on Apr. 15 was sailing through the North Atlantic mere miles away from where the Titanic had sunk the night before. At the time, the chief steward hadn't yet learned of the Titanic's fate, so he wasn't even on the lookout for icebergs. He simply spotted a streak of red paint along the iceberg's base, which most likely meant a ship had collided with it in the last 12 hours.
This next photo was taken by a Captain De Carteret of the Minia, one of a few cable ships -- vessels ordinarily used to lay deep sea cables, such as those for telecommunications -- sent to the site of the shipwreck to recover corpses and debris. The captain claimed this was the only iceberg in the area, and the red paint was again a clear sign that a ship had recently struck it. There's some disagreement over whether this was the only iceberg in the area, but it certainly seems likely that something had hit it, and the odds are good that that something was the Titanic.
If you were to trace the story of the Titanic to its earliest human origins, you couldn't really go much further back than 1907, when the White Star Lines first drew up plans to build the three largest ocean liners the world had even seen: Olympic, Titanic, and Gigantic, which was later renamed Britannic and sank in the Mediterranean during World War I. From conception to sinking, the Titanic really only lasted about five years, although obviously its memory has endured far longer.
But by comparison, the iceberg began its slow journey to the North Atlantic over three thousand years ago. Again, we can only guess at the exact details, but the story likely began with snowfall on the western coast of Greenland somewhere around 1,000 BCE. After a few months, this snow has been turned into a more compacted form called firn, which then over subsequent decades is compressed into dense ice by the weight of newer snow on top of it.
The frozen water in these glaciers is slowly forced further westward toward the sea. When they finally reach the coast of the Arctic Ocean, the lapping tides break off chunks of the ice, and icebergs are calved from the glacier, some 30 centuries after their source water was first deposited. The iceberg that sank the Titanic began its journey as a rough contemporary of King Tutankhamun, entire civilizations rising and falling while it made its slow march to infamy.
