The night the Titanic sank was also calm and clear, but Titanic’s lookouts noticed the mirage strip appearing like a band of haze stretching all around the horizon, as they entered the thermal inversion in the ice region.ĭan Snow visits RMS Titanic expert Tim Maltin to sort the fact from the fiction about the ship’s final hours. In fact, several ships which passed through the area in which Titanic sank, both before and after the Titanic tragedy, recorded abnormal refraction and mirages at the horizon. This created the same thermal inversion conditions at Titanic’s crash site as occurred along the coast of Britain in early 2021, creating apparent fog banks or “sea hedges” above which ships appeared to float in the sky, despite the perfectly clear weather.
But above the level of the top of those icebergs much warmer air drifted across from the nearby warmer waters of the Gulf Stream, trapping cold air underneath it. Titanic sank in the freezing waters of the Labrador Current in the North Atlantic, surrounded by dozens of large icebergs, some of which were 200 feet high. Image Credit: Public Domain Thermal Inversion and the Titanic
RMS Titanic departing Southampton on 10 April 1912.
