Ship that tried to warn the Titanic about iceberg has been discovered more than a century later
Emma Guinness
Featured Image Credit: Photo 12/Alamy Stock Photo/Bangor University
The Titanic was one of the greatest disasters in maritime history, and the ship that tried to warn the doomed liner of the iceberg that sealed its fate has been found.
The merchant steamship SS Mesaba tried to alert the Titanic of the icebergs as it was also crossing the Atlantic on her maiden voyage in 1912.
The ship contacted the Titanic via a radio message, where it told Captain Edward Smith that the coast of Newfoundland was littered with rogue icebergs.
However, despite the Titanic receiving the message, the warning was not heeded, and it went on to sink after hitting an iceberg, killing over 1,500 passengers and crew.
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The SS Meseba went on to sail for another six years before she eventually met her fate when she was torpedoed during World War One in 1918.
She sank after being hit by a German U-boat, and her final resting place in the Irish Sea went undiscovered for over a century.
However, the wreck was finally located thanks to a project by researchers at Bangor University in Wales, which discovered the vessel using a multibeam sonar.
Live Science put the magnitude of the find into context, revealing that there are 273 ships in the 7,500 square mile area of the Irish Sea, and 100 of those found by the new research would have otherwise gone unidentified - or been falsely identified as a different ship.
Dr Innes McCartney, a nautical archaeologist and historian from Bangor University, said in a statement about the find: "Previously we would be able to dive to a few sites a year to visually identify wrecks.
"The Prince Madog's unique sonar capabilities have enabled us to develop a relatively low-cost means of examining the wrecks. We can connect this back to the historical information without costly physical interaction with each site."
He added: "It is a 'game-changer' for marine archaeology."
The news comes as the Titanic wreck is said to be slowly disintegrating, having been heavily monitored since its discovery in 1985.
News of the wreck's disappearance from a metal-eating bacteria was revealed in 2021 by Stockton Rush, the president of OceanGate Expeditions.
They said: "The ocean is taking this thing, and we need to document it before it all disappears or becomes unrecognisable."
As reported by CBS news, experts have now predicted that the Titanic wreck is disappearing so fast that history's most famous shipwreck could be completely gone within a few decades.