Scientists Finally Found the Ship That Warned the Titanic About the Massive Iceberg Ahead

At the time of construction, the RMS Titanic was a behemoth among ships, hailed as “unsinkable” by its builders. On the morning of April 14, 1912, Captain Smith cancelled a lifeboat drill in favor of a church service, believing that the ship was indeed immortal. Throughout the day, the ship’s wireless radio operators kept buzzing with iceberg warnings. One of these ships was the SS Mesaba. But the warning never reached the control center. In the calm of the nighttime, when passengers had retired to their cabins, the crew informed the captain that the ship had crashed into an iceberg and a barrage of water had already flooded their mail room. The shipwreck, that killed 1,500 people, remains infamously carved into the memory of Americans.

But little attention was paid to SS Mesaba, which actually tried to prevent the Titanic’s ill fate. "Ice seemed to be one solid wall of ice at least 16 feet high," Mesaba's message read as per Titanic expert Tim Maltin (@Timmaltin). Six years after the Titanic tragedy, the British merchant steamship SS Mesaba was blasted by a German submarine’s torpedo during World War I, killing 20 people on board. Mesaba, like Titanic, was built in Belfast. On September 1, 1918, while it was making a convoy voyage from Liverpool to Philadelphia, as per Coflein, a German boat hurtled a torpedo at it. While scientists were aware that the wreck of Mesaba existed, they were unsure of where exactly it sank.

In September 2022, a team of researchers from Bournemouth University and Bangor University announced that they had discovered Mesaba’s wreck at the bottom of the Irish Sea, according to a press release. One of the researchers, Innes McCartney, also described the process of finding this wreck in his book Echoes From the Deep. To comb the sea for the wreck’s exact location, the team employed “multibeam sonar,” a technology that can map details of objects on the seafloor using sound waves. While aboard their research vessel, Prince Madog, the team was able to scan nearly 273 shipwrecks, including cargo ships, submarines, ocean liners, tankers, and trawlers. The team then matched the collected data with the U.K. Hydrographic Office’s database of wrecks and other objects.

McCartney said that this advanced sonar, short for sound navigating and ranging, was a "game-changer" in marine archaeology. "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,” he said in the press release. He believed that it would be of “key interest to marine scientists, environmental agencies, hydrographers, heritage managers, maritime archaeologists and historians.” 

Michael Roberts, a maritime geoscientist at Bangor University, told CNN, “A lot of these wrecks are in deep water. There’s no light down there, so you cannot see much at all.” Multibeam sonar, on the other hand, “a way of really effectively visualizing, using sound, to see something you cannot see with the naked eye—like an ultrasound during pregnancy,” Roberts explained. Roberts shared that he and his team are extensively studying these wreck sites to 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.”