![]() "But the only scenario I could come up with to explain all of the contradictions was that the ship broke at a very shallow angle." Close examination of the pieces showed that they had been interrupted in the middle of tearing apart-a sign, Long says, that the ship was still at a low-enough angle (he estimates only 11 degrees) that its stern could regain buoyancy as it began to crack. "There are a lot of very contradictory things you can see in the pieces," he says. ![]() It was impossible, he believed, for the ship to have broken up the way experts for two decades believed it did, with the stern rising up to a 45-degree angle before the ship's hull split. When Roger Long, a naval architect hired to accompany the expedition, began analyzing the edges of the hull pieces, he came to a surprising conclusion. The two divers, whose discovery of a lost German U-boat was chronicled in the book Shadow Divers, say the ship broke up and sank while still relatively flat on the surface-a potential sign of weakness, they believe, that was covered up after the disaster. Titanic's Last Secrets, to be published next month, describes the work of Richie Kohler and John Chatterton, wreck-diving historians who believe two recently discovered pieces of the Titanic's bottom prove the ship's stern never rose high in the air the way many Titanic experts, including Cameron, originally believed. In What Really Sank the Titanic: New Forensic Discoveries, Jennifer Hooper McCarty, a materials scientist at Oregon Health and Science University, and Tim Foecke, a scientist at the National Institute of Standards and Technology, make the case that it wasn't the ship's steel that was weak it was the rivets, the all-important metal pins that held the steel hull plates together. In two new books, a group of historians, naval architects, and materials scientists argue that fresh evidence has further unraveled the familiar story of the Titanic, raising more questions about what caused the disaster. ![]() Still, the search for answers about the Titanic didn't end there. ![]()
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