Ship That Warned Titanic of Iceberg Discovered at the Bottom of the Sea

The ship that sent an iceberg warning to the Titanic on its fateful voyage in 1912 has been discovered on the ocean floor.

The wreck of the SS Mesaba, a merchant vessel that sent a wireless radio message to the Titanic as it crossed the Atlantic, was identified by researchers at Bangor University in Wales using multibeam sonar.

Although the Titanic did receive the Mesaba's message, the warning never reached the captain on the bridge and, in the early hours of April 15, the "unsinkable" liner hit an iceberg and sank.

The Mesaba was sunk six years later in the Irish Sea. It was making a convoy voyage from Liverpool to Philadelphia on September 1, 1918, when it was torpedoed by a German U-boat. Twenty people were killed.

The remains of the Titanic were found in 1985, but the Mesaba's wreck has only now been positively identified.

Sonar—sound navigation and ranging—uses sound waves to measure the distance between a sound source and various objects in its surroundings. It can be used for navigation, communication and mapping, most frequently in underwater vessels.

Active sonar, used by the Bangor researchers to map the seabed and identify the Mesaba wreckage, involves emitting pulses of sounds and listening for echoes. The speed of sound is constant, so by measuring the amount of time between a chirp being emitted and hearing its echo, a vessel can calculate the distance to the reflecting object.

This is also a technique used by animals, known as echolocation. It is used by marine mammals such as whales and dolphins, as well as bats.

The advanced multibeam sonar used by the Bangor team on their research boat, the Prince Madog, enables seabed mapping in increased levels of detail, allowing the details of structures such as shipwrecks to be observed.

One of the Bangor researchers, Innes McCartney, described this multibeam sonar as "a game-changer for marine archaeology."

"Previously we would be able to dive to a few sites a year to visually identify wrecks," McCartney said in a statement. "The Prince Madog's unique sonar capabilities has 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. It should be of key interest to marine scientists, environmental agencies, hydrographers, heritage managers, maritime archaeologists and historians."

As well as the Mesaba's wreck, the researchers found 273 shipwrecks lying across 7,500 square miles of the Irish Sea, many of which had been wrongly identified as other wrecked ships before.

Michael Roberts, who led the sonar surveys at Bangor's School of Ocean Sciences, said in a statement: "We have also been examining these wreck sites to better understand how objects on the seabed interact with physical and biological processes, which in turn can help scientists support the development and growth of the marine energy sector."