How did a piece of ice cut through the solid steel hull of the Titanic?
In: Physics
It didn’t cut through, it ripped through.
Ice is softer than steel, but the pressure that the ice applies to the side of the hull is a force x the area it gets spread over. A knife cuts because it concentrates a small amount of force onto a very very tiny area (the cutting edge of the blade). In the case of the iceberg, the pressure of the collision was huge, because it was a large iceberg, so that pressure pushed in the steel plates and dented them, and they basically popped out at the seams and let the water in.
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