How did a piece of ice cut through the solid steel hull of the Titanic?
In: Physics
A sheet of ice a foot thick is strong enough to drive a car on. The iceberg was hundreds of feet thick, and weighed around a million pounds. The ship might have won if it was a solid chunk of steel, but an inch thick skin of steel loses to hundreds of feet of ice.
“Solid steel”
Boats are pretty famously not solid. They’re very, very hollow.
The Titanic’s hull was 1 inch thick. It hit an iceberg. Not an ice cube. If you Google “average iceberg mass” the result it spits out is “several billion tons”. And that ice is actually very, very solid. And sharp and jagged.
Ice is hard. It hit fast enough to deform the steel, and kept deforming it until it was broken. The cold temperature didn’t help the steel any either.
You know how it hurts to hit the ground too hard? But feels fine if you land right?
Well due to how fast the titanic was going, and the weight of the ice, it hit the iceberg too hard and its hull was not designed for hard impacts like other ships can be.
Ferritic steels have what is called a ductile to brittle transition temperature. This means as steel is cooled through a specific temperature (dependent on the chemical composition, heat treatment, etc) it will rapidly lose toughness and become brittle. The steel used in the Titanic would also have significantly more inclusions than modern steels.
Because the temperature of the steel would have been around 30 degrees fahrenheit, it was too brittle and did not have the toughness required to absorb the impact of the iceberg.
Think of the steel as tin foil wrapped around boat shaped frames. The steel that forms the outside of the boat is only as strong as it needs to be, so, it’s actually quite thin. The momentum of the boat carried enough force to easily tear through as the inertia and weight of the ice was too great.
See how can your finger cut through a piece of Aluminum foil? Because it’s sooo super thin compared to the mass of your finger that even tho aluminum is much stronger then your nails… you still rip through aluminum foil.
The iceberg was a huge HUGE chunk of ice, compared to the(relatively) thin walls of steel in the hull.
What a lot of these answers are missing, is that the hull was not a solid wall of steel. Ships were made of thousands of steel plates that were riveted together. The steel only buckled when it hit the berg, but it was enough to separate the seams and pop the rivets.
Simply a question of mass, iceberg big, piece of steel on bolt is made up of layers riveted together. One of the object has to give and it’s not gonna be the enormously large glacier.
I’m a bit of a Titanic nerd. Common understood theory is not that it was a rip or a tear, but really a split. The ships hull was made of plates of overlapping iron, held together with rivets. When the ship hit the iceberg, the plates deformed and gaps opened between where the the plates used to overlap, allowing water to enter.
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