Every Little Thing.

inothernews:

From the New York Daily News:

Astronomers at Texas State University-San Marcos found that in January 1912, three months before the ship sank in the Atlantic and took more than 1,500 lives down with it, a perfect storm of astronomical events may have set the stage for the disaster.

The team found that on January 4, 1912, a nearly full moon was at its closest approach to Earth in 1,400 years. And the day before, the Earth was at perihelion, or its closest approach to the sun during its yearly spin around our star.

The combined effects wreaked astronomical havoc with the Atlantic Ocean, generating a powerful spring tide that was able to dislodge Greenland icebergs off Labrador and Newfoundland, bergs that would normally have required more melting before being able to float away.

Further, the powerful high tides generated by the moon put the bergs in a southbound express lane, of sorts, packing movement that would have taken years into just a few months. That contributed to the presence of an unusually large amount of icebergs in the North Atlantic shipping lanes just as the Titanic was speeding toward North America on its maiden voyage.

“It was the closest approach of the moon to the Earth in more than 1,400 years, and this configuration maximized the moon’s tide-raising forces on Earth’s oceans. That’s remarkable,” the university’s Donald Olson said in a press release.