Smith tried to channel the public bloodlust for an explanation about how so many people could have died so horrifically while the corporate boss was sitting comfortably in a New York hotel drinking tea with members of the U.S. Senate. This outrage was familiar to Smith. For decades in Congress, Smith had sought to hold accountable railroad bosses whose businesses served the public interest but were known to pinch pennies and cut corners that endangered the lives of riders. Smith believed the steamer lines behaved the same way and was prepared to craft new regulations for a sloppy and dangerous industry. But to do so required confirming his presumption of negligence. And ideally, he would need to hear from not just White Star officials like Ismay but passengers too, who had little loyalty to a steamer company whose failure had just killed their loved ones and left them freezing for hours at sea.

  Nine witnesses told their stories during the hearing’s first two days, not yet a week after the disaster. On the third day, Smith moved the proceedings back to Washington, having tired of the incessant interruptions from eager reporters, desperate family members, and riled-up members of the public. Back in the Capitol, Smith continued the questioning for sixteen more days, calling a total of eighty-six witnesses and building a transcript file nearly twelve hundred pages long that would be the closest thing the Titanic would have to a contemporary eyewitness account. The British Board of Trade conducted a separate investigation. Together, the findings from both probes built the foundation of knowledge of the disaster that would inform more than a century’s worth of stories, retellings, books, films, musicals, documentaries, poems, songs, video games, and endless interpretations, including one from a British composer in 1969 who created a “soundscape” exhibition that played recordings of survivors’ testimony and emergency Morse code messages. The idea, he said, was that the story “never completely dies but merely grows fainter and fainter.”

  The investigation had a practical effect as well. With his closing speech, Smith submitted a list of proposed regulations for all ships that passed through American waters. They should slow down in areas of ice and create a firm chain of command for captains to be clearly informed of navigational threats. No longer should ship telegraphs be used for frivolous messages between passengers of different ships, and the use of rockets must never be celebratory, only to signal emergency. And most of all, all future ships should be equipped with enough lifeboats for every single passenger.

  “This should be the occasion for a new birth of vigilance,” Smith said while delivering a set of reforms to the shipping industry that would become his single greatest legislative contribution over twenty-four years in public office. “Future generations must accord to this event a crowning motive for better things.”

  * * *

  Defining a shipwreck is a bit like defining a car crash. Two components are required: a car and a moment of impact. But from there, endless variables obscure simple explanations. You might say a wreck is a watercraft that runs into trouble at sea. But trouble isn’t the same as sinking, nor is the ocean the exclusive keeper of wrecks. Is an accident required, such as the Titanic’s swipe with an iceberg? Perhaps not when an intentional torpedo can dispatch passenger liners like the RMS Lusitania or the SS Athenia. Strangely, a shipwreck doesn’t even need to be a ship; crashed airliners, flooded trailers, and Jeeps carried out to sea are wrecks all the same. Summing up a wreck may be less a matter of physics than of philosophy. According to the colonial scholar José Rabasa, a shipwreck’s central quality is simply that “it marks the movement from order to chaos.”

  Usually, the deeper the fall, the harder the crash. Any falling object reaches its terminal velocity when the dragging force of resistance equals the downward pull of gravity, which explains why a single glass marble would sink nearly ten times faster than a ship as large as the Titanic. Had the engineers who built the Titanic wanted the ship to sink as fast as possible, they might have made each surface smoothed and rounded, a bit like a torpedo. But sinking speed would be a poor priority. And anyone who’s spent months living on a dank submarine would tell you that such a ship would be dreadful to sail on.

  A ship is in danger the moment it starts taking on more water than it can bail out. There are exceptions, of course. Puncture your canoe and you’d have about thirty seconds. Ships as large as the Titanic can take a few hours. If sinking speed were a race, in dead last would be the SS Atlantus, an old concrete ship that’s been sinking since 1926 off the coast of Cape May, New Jersey, slowly receding into shallow water every year. Concrete ships were a wartime experiment, ordered into production by Woodrow Wilson. But their design made little room for cargo, which left them expensive to operate. Since then, the Atlantus has had a tough time, exposed to both sun and salt water, two of the most corrosive forces on the planet. But being half-sunk has also given it new life. Plants grow on it, birds build nests on it, and at one point someone even put a billboard on it.

  There are scientists who study the ways ships sink. The field of maritime forensics inspects how ships are built and the variables in construction, cargo, and navigation that give some vessels a far better chance than others of surviving an accident. Parks Stephenson, a marine forensic analyst, has been studying the phenomenon known as shipfall for decades. Most of all, he studies the precise position of the Titanic as it sank.

  “I’ve been trying to get away from it for years, but it keeps pulling me back,” he joked, without really joking.

  Stephenson has looked at so much data for so many years that he no longer believes that the Titanic sideswiped an iceberg, an assertion that’s gotten him literally laughed out of rooms. Based on the firsthand accounts and the position of debris on the seafloor, Stephenson believes the ship grazed the iceberg from below, a motion known as grounding that’s consistent with the intense vibrations survivors recalled, rather than being jolted across a room, as might be expected from a strike on one side or the other. Nevertheless, the sideswipe explanation remains the consensus of researchers.

  Every ship sinks differently. Some bow first, others from the stern, and still others from a capsizing roll. Yet the two measures of physics that will explain how any ship falls are buoyancy and equalization. When a formerly buoyant ship sinks, all remaining pockets of buoyant air will move upward in the ship, sometimes flipping the ship over.

  Eventually, when all buoyancy has been released, the vessel is referred to as equalized; internal water pressure is equal to external water pressure. At that point, any ship, no matter how big, small, old, or young, a high-end steamship or a working-class lobster trawler, will succumb to weight distribution and sink with its heaviest side down. Often, the heaviest components, like engines and boilers, are in the hull, which explains why ships tend to settle upright. But there are the occasional anomalies when ships sink topside down, usually owing to heavy cargo carried higher in the hull. Wreck divers flock regularly to the USS San Diego, about ten miles from Fire Island, New York, to see a World War I navy cruiser that was dragged down by its top-heavy weapons systems and has spent the last century sitting awkwardly upside down.

  In the same way, any water can take wrecks: shallow, deep, fresh, salty, icy, or warm. You could look at the high density of wrecks in the English Channel or the coastal waters of Spain and posit that England and Spain have the world’s deadliest seas. But the reason is more likely that the Spanish and Brits sent out more ships between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries than almost all other countries combined. This also explains the mystery of the Bermuda Triangle, which turns out to not be much of a mystery. Several years ago, an Australian scientist named Karl Kruszelnicki published a study that showed that the high concentration of ships that run into trouble in the triangle between Bermuda, South Florida, and Puerto Rico is not the result of aliens, crystals, or hydromagnetic whirlpools. “It is close to the Equator, near a wealthy part of the world, America, therefore you have a lot of traffic,” Kruszelnicki said. Sitting directly in the path of Atlantic hurricanes doesn’t help, either. Studying the numbers, he concluded that vessels wreck in the Bermuda Triangle at the same rate as anywhere else. A historian with the Naval Historical Foundation put it more bluntly: “To say quite a few ships and airplanes have gone down there is like saying there are an awful lot of car accidents on the New Jersey Turnpike—surprise, surprise.”

  (The U.S. Coast Guard has come to the same conclusion about the Triangle, which all but proves a government conspiracy.)

  If the waters east of Florida really are a nothing-to-see-here patch of ordinary ocean, how can anyone explain the ships that disappeared for no reason, like the USS Cyclops and USS Proteus, two navy cargo ships that vanished in 1918 (Cyclops) and 1941 (Proteus) without a trace of evidence while in the Bermuda waters?

  Science has a strange answer for this too, and it has to do with water. The density of a ship is fixed. But if you reduce the density of the seawater, such as with gas bubbles from deep-sea methane vents known to exist near Bermuda, a ship will suddenly become more dense by comparison and start to sink. Felling a cargo ship would require relentless and voluminous methane, but at least in a lab, scientists have shown it could work. For its part, the navy says the Cyclops and Proteus were probably hit by storms or mines and sank, simple as that.

  Bermuda or anywhere, not all wrecks are accidents. Sometimes humans actively root for wrecks, up to the point when they are forced to create one urgently, the maneuver known as scuttling. Steel-hulled ships are designed to last as little as fifteen years if they’re driven hard or up to forty if they’re well maintained. But more than that is highly unusual. Eventually, all ships become less efficient, harder to operate, and more expensive to maintain. When their day comes, all ships go to the great shipyard in the sky, which, as it happens, is most often underwater.

  Scuttling was once a method of war strategy. Hernán Cortés famously scuttled his entire fleet of ships in 1519 to prevent his crew from deserting him after they landed in Mexico. Following Germany’s surrender in 1919, German naval commanders decided to scuttle their entire fleet of fifty-two vessels to prevent the British navy from seizing the ships and using them to attack Germany. The Germans opened watertight doors, disengaged hatch covers, and cleared all portholes to invite in water. The British didn’t notice for hours, until the listing of the largest destroyers had become obvious, but by then it was too late. One can imagine the displeasure of the British, who, in the most British of protests, reluctantly rescued the German soldiers who were waiting patiently in lifeboats.

  Modern warfare, however, allows the intentional disposing of multimillion-dollar assets only in the most dire of circumstances. More often, ships are scuttled as a way of disposal at the end of their working lives, either to become artificial reefs or occasionally for navy target practice, as was the case of a decommissioned thirty-six-year-old U.S. frigate called the Ford. In 2019, the U.S. and Singapore armies cleaned out the Ford of all fuel and electrical equipment and pounded the frigate with dozens of Harpoon and Hellfire missiles and then studied the precise way it broke apart, collapsed, and took its leave to the depths of the Pacific.

  Cargo is different. Scuttling unwanted or dangerous cargo often requires a ship to sink it in order to ensure it actually sinks and doesn’t wash up on a crowded beach somewhere. In the latter half of the 1960s, the U.S. Department of Defense commissioned a quiet but dramatic scuttling mission called Operation CHASE—short for “Cut Holes and Sink ’Em”—to dispose of World War II–era munitions off the coast of Florida and the Bahamas. The rationale behind the operation was that the U.S. military had made a surplus of chemical weapons in case they were needed to fight the Nazis, and, after nearly two decades storing them in warehouses, they decided that the ocean was the best place to ditch them. No member of the U.S. Congress would want chemical weapons buried underground in their district, plus the ocean was so limitless and complex in chemistry that, it was thought, it would somehow neutralize the weapons without any danger or damage. This was a convenient assumption that facilitated the fast dumping of the weapons-filled canisters, often by ship captains who were so anxious to offload such dangerous cargo that they were known to toss them overboard a few miles offshore instead of the requisite one hundred miles or more, where they would sink in much deeper water.

  Such reckless conduct might have been met with legal challenges and public protests if Operation CHASE hadn’t been classified. The navy didn’t want America’s adversaries to know they could effectively dumpster dive in international waters for some of the most dangerous biochemicals on earth. In the era of DDT and Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, officials also wanted to limit public outrage about ocean pollution and dangers to public health from chemical weapons, which are notoriously dangerous to transport, store, and destroy. But this didn’t last long, nor was the navy entirely honest about the extent of the program. In the summer of 2004, a ship dredging for clams off the coast of New Jersey accidentally pulled up an old artillery shell that, when opened, appeared to be filled with black tar. Someone had the sense to call a weapons team, and when three technicians arrived, they all incurred skin burns and pus-filled blisters on their arms. It turned out the shell was filled with concentrated mustard gas.

  In fact, seawater does break down most human-made substances—even chemical weapons—but not without extreme danger to marine and human health. When exposed to seawater, mustard gas forms a thick gel that rolls around the ocean floor for as long as five years. It’s deadly, but not as deadly as nerve gas, which the navy also admitted to tossing overboard. A few drops of nerve agent can kill a blue whale in a minute. It lasts about six weeks before it breaks down into its nonlethal chemical parts, but in that time, it’ll kill everything it touches. In 1987, hundreds of dolphins washed up on beaches in Virginia and New Jersey with extreme burns and blisters that resembled a reaction to mustard gas. Biologists confronted navy officials, who admitted the Operation CHASE dumping of chemical weapons was in fact slightly more widespread than they previously said. The navy promised an investigation, but it was short-circuited by Pentagon leaders, who concluded that the dolphins died from a bacteria or viral infection and left it at that.

  As it turned out, the program was far more extensive than the American military ever let on. The Pentagon now admits that the dumping program began in 1944 and proceeded for more than twenty-five years. Contrary to claims that the dumping was isolated to international waters off Florida, there were actually at least eleven dump sites, six on the East Coast, two on the Gulf Coast, and a handful in California, Hawaii, and Alaska. The sites aren’t all known—records were sparsely kept at the time, perhaps intentionally. But in all, the scuttling operation is believed to have included sixty-four million pounds of nerve and mustard agents; four hundred thousand chemical-filled bombs, land mines, and rockets; and more than five hundred tons of radioactive waste.

  All of it was too dangerous to abandon on land, and so it was relegated to the ocean, in equal parts everyone’s problem and no one’s.

  “It’s impossible to know the true danger even today,” Craig Williams, a chemical weapons destruction expert, told me. “Whether it’s gotten more dangerous from corrosion of the canisters or less dangerous from dispersion in the water is anyone’s guess. But this stuff is unequivocally dangerous, and it’s still out there.”

  * * *

  In the weeks after the Titanic disappeared, engineers and laypeople alike debated the condition of the ship as a newborn wreck. Where was it? they wondered. And did it sink to the seabed, or was it somewhere else?

  On May 16, 1912, a month after the ship disappeared, a writer for the Medford Patriot in Medford, Oklahoma, explored the idea long debated by sailors that ships don’t sink to the bottom but instead stop halfway down and become suspended in the water column for all time. This was based on the erroneous calculation that with depth, extra pressure resulted in water becoming more dense. Therefore, once the ship crossed the threshold from water less dense than the ship itself to water more dense, it would stop sinking and simply hover, no longer a ship and not yet a wreck. “On account of the weight of water at great depth the density [is] so increased that dead bodies or sunken ships would not go down beyond a certain depth but remain eternally suspended in the sea drifting about at the same depth,” the Patriot reported.

  In the aftermath of the Titanic, this kind of scientific lore was soundly rejected by both the U.S. Hydrographic Office and the editors of Scientific American, who wrote in an editorial that, no, water does not become denser with depth. In fact, laboratory experiments at the time had shown it was easier to increase the density of steel than it was to compress the molecules of water, which made the idea of a significantly denser form of liquid water inconceivable. Moreover, government engineers added, the increasing water pressure would have compressed the Titanic on its way down, in effect increasing its density relative to water and accelerating rather than slowing the velocity of its fall.

  That debate was settled. But much less clear in both the scientific and public discourses was exactly what sort of conditions surrounded the Titanic in its new deep-sea grave. Older ships like the British steamer SS Copenhagen, which sank off the coast of Florida in 1900, were well understood on account of resting in shallow water. A scientist sitting above the wreck could take a fairly accurate survey of the fish and kelp and measure the microbial activity in the water to hypothesize how the ships were changing in their marine environment. But the Titanic had gone more than a mile deeper than anyone had ever traveled, and the creatures, conditions, and currents of the deep sea were as unknown as the surface of the moon.

  One could expect that the deep sea was cold. In 1847, the American astronomer Matthew Fontaine Maury was one of the first to demystify the movements of currents that carried warm and cool water in a constantly moving conveyor belt of biological circulation. Maury became an ocean loyalist after a stagecoach accident in his youth soured his attitude toward anything that occurred on land, and he learned about the ocean currents by studying the logbooks of old ships, some dating back to the American Revolution. Reading the anecdotal reports from long-dead captains about wind patterns, calm spots, whale migration routes, and dramatic changes in ship speed in certain stretches of ocean, Maury pieced together the first maps that showed a current of cold water moving along the ocean floor from the poles to the equator, where it would then be heated, rise to the surface, and be carried back to the poles. This aligned with the stories of mariners who had long pulled up buckets of ocean mud to cool their jugs of drinking water. The seafloor’s uninhabitable frigidity was known, but if deeper meant colder, then it stood to reason that, at a certain point, water would be colder than ice.