What sank the Titanic?

Rice University professor: Unique conditions on Earth and in space may have contributed to tragedy 

HOUSTON – (March 21, 2012) – With an updated presentation of “Night of the Titanic” now playing at the Houston Museum of Natural Science’s Burke Baker Planetarium, Rice University Patricia Reiff is available to explain why more than human error was to blame for the tragic sinking of the Titanic 100 years ago.

Reiff, a professor of physics and astronomy and associate director of outreach at the Rice Space Institute, is a science adviser of “Night of the Titanic.”

“In the movie, we show the combination of events that contributed to the disaster,” Reiff said. “These include the fact that there were no moon or aurora to light the iceberg, no binoculars for the lookouts, no wind to cause splashing sounds and a radio room that was more interested in sending correspondence for its business passengers than in listening for iceberg reports.

“Space had a hand as well,” she said. “The sun was in a very low part of its cycle. The extremely low sunspot numbers we had in 2007 through 2009 were similar to the very low sunspot numbers of 1911 through 1914. Low sunspot numbers are related to unusually cold weather at 40 degrees north latitude, so the icebergs had not melted away like they normally would have, and fewer auroras would have lit the skies. Since then, warming due to human influence has masked cooler temperatures from the sun’s recent low ebb. But as the sun is now returning from its slumber, I predict we will find global temperatures considerably higher in the next few years. No one will be able to deny global climate change by the time of the next solar maximum (2013).”

Reiff is available to media for comment on what led to the Titanic disaster and how advances in science have helped avert a repeat. To schedule an interview, contact Mike Williams at 713-348-6728 or mikewilliams@rice.edu.

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Related materials:

Houston Museum of Natural Science: www.hmns.org

View a preview of the original presentation here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pXlgCato3_4

An article by NOAA showing the correlation between low sunspot number and low temperatures during the Titanic era can be found here:

http://www.oar.noaa.gov/spotlite/archive/spot_sunclimate.html

Located on a 300-acre forested campus in Houston, Rice University is consistently ranked among the nation’s top 20 universities by U.S. News & World Report. Rice has highly respected schools of Architecture, Business, Continuing Studies, Engineering, Humanities, Music, Natural Sciences and Social Sciences and is known for its “unconventional wisdom.” With 3,708 undergraduates and 2,374 graduate students, Rice’s undergraduate student-to-faculty ratio is 6-to-1. Its residential college system builds close-knit communities and lifelong friendships, just one reason why Rice has been ranked No. 1 for best quality of life multiple times by the Princeton Review and No. 4 for “best value” among private universities by Kiplinger’s Personal Finance. To read “What they’re saying about Rice,” go to http://www.rice.edu/nationalmedia/Rice.pdf.