The "unsinkable" global financial system is rushing headlong toward its encounter with the iceberg.
Why did the Titanic sink, despite being considered unsinkable? The conventional answer is the design of its watertight compartments was flawed: the watertight bulkheads were limited in height to a few feet above the waterline.
The ship was designed such that if the first few compartments were flooded, the flooding would be contained by the watertight bulkheads.
But the iceberg ripped open a gash almost a third the ship's length, flooding the first six compartments. As the ship's bow sank, water poured over the bulkhead into the seventh compartment, and so on, until the ship's bow sank deep enough to bring the ship almost vertical, at which point the hull broke roughly in half--hence the two hull sections discovered on the bottom of the Atlantic in 1985.
But further analysis has revealed this isn't the only reason Titanic sank. It turned out the ship's hull plates were brittle due to high sulfur content in the steel, especially at cold temperatures (the water was near freezing at the time of the wreck).
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