泰坦尼克号沉默新说：或因海市蜃楼.doc

双语阅读：泰坦尼克号沉没新说 或因海市蜃楼 Maybe we can fault freak atmospheric conditions that caused a mirage or an even rarer astronomical event that sent icebergs into shipping lanes. After an entire century that included two high-profile government investigations and countless books and movies, were still debating what really caused the Titanic to hit an iceberg and sink on that crystal-clear chilly night. Maybe theres more to blame than human folly and hubris. Maybe we can fault freak atmospheric conditions that caused a mirage or an even rarer astronomical event that sent icebergs into shipping lanes. Those are two of the newer theories being proposed by a Titanic author and a team of astronomers. New theories and research are important but at its most basic what happened is they failed to heed warnings and they hit the iceberg because they were going too fast, said James Delgado, director of maritime heritage at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. One of the novel new theories says Titanic could have been the victim of a mirage that is similar to what people see in the desert. Its the brainchild of Tim Maltin, a historian who has written three books about Titanic. The unusually cold sea air caused light to bend abnormally downward, Maltin said. The Titanics first officer, William McMaster Murdoch, saw what he described as a haze on the horizon, and that iceberg came right out of the haze, Maltin said, quoting from the surviving second officers testimony. Other ships, including those rescuing survivors, reported similar strange visuals and had trouble navigating around the icebergs, he said. British meteorologists later monitored the site for those freaky thermal inversions and said 60 percent of the time they checked, the inversions were present, Maltin said. The same inversions could have made the Titanics rescue rockets appear lower in the sky, giving a rescue ship the impression that the Titanic was smaller and farther away, Maltin said. Physicists Donald Ols