The
sinking of the RMS Titanic occurred on the night of 14 April through to the morning of 15 April 1912 in the north
Atlantic Ocean, four days into her
maiden voyage from
Southampton to
New York City. The largest
passenger liner in service at the time,
Titanic had an estimated 2,224 people on board when she struck an
iceberg at 23:40 (ship's time
[a]) on Sunday, 14 April 1912. She sank two hours and forty minutes later at 02:20 (05:18 GMT) on Monday, 15 April, causing the deaths of over 1,500 people, making it one of the deadliest
peacetime maritime disasters in history.
Titanic had received several warnings of sea ice during 14 April but was travelling near her maximum speed when she collided with the iceberg. The ship suffered a glancing blow that buckled her
starboard (right) side and opened five of her sixteen compartments to the sea.
Titanic had been designed to stay afloat with four flooded compartments but not five, and the crew soon realised that the ship was going to sink. They used
rocket flares and radio ("wireless") messages to attract help as the passengers were put into
lifeboats. However, there were far too few lifeboats available and many were not filled to their capacity due to a poorly managed evacuation.
The ship broke up as she sank with over a thousand passengers and crew members still aboard. Almost all those who jumped or fell into the water died from
hypothermia within minutes.
RMS Carpathia arrived on the scene about an hour and a half after the sinking and had rescued the last of the survivors in the lifeboats by 09:15 on 15 April, little more than 24 hours after
Titanic's crew had received their first warnings of drifting ice. The disaster caused widespread public outrage over the lack of lifeboats, lax shipping regulations, and the unequal treatment of the different passenger classes aboard the ship. Enquiries set up in the wake of the disaster recommended sweeping changes to maritime regulations. This led in 1914 to the establishment of the
International Convention for the Safety of Life at Sea (SOLAS), which still governs maritime safety today.
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