Scientists Say Tiny Flaw May Have Caused Titanic's Rapid Demise

Oct. 30, 2006 — -- New research suggests the catastrophic sinking of one of the largest ships ever built was caused by a hidden flaw in its smallest piece as scientists further investigate the century-old mystery of the Titanic.

Scientists specializing in metallurgy say they've concluded the Titanic's fatal flaw was in its rivets.

"I think we can honestly say that this is probably the most comprehensive study that's ever been done that addresses the sinking theory," said Jennifer Hooper McCarty, a forensic metallurgist. "We're the only people that have ever looked at Titanic rivets."

Any school kid can tell you it was an iceberg that sank the Titanic, but what's baffled historians for nearly a century is why it sank so fast.

McCarty joined Tim Foecke of the National Institute of Standards and Technology for the project to determine what happened when the ship went down in April 1912.

Foecke's work in forensic metallurgy includes an investigation of how the World Trade Center collapsed, in a project that looked at the breakdown of metal beams under intense heat.

He put those tools to work on the Titanic after a 10-year investigation of historical documents and wreckage from the ocean floor kept turning up one key problem: The Titanic's rivets, which were used to keep the ship's hull together, seemed to have simply "popped" without even stretching first.

"When they're missing a head, you know they are not acting the way they're supposed to," McCarty said.

While most of the ship's 3 million rivets were made of steel, those used in the bow, the point of impact, were made of wrought iron. Here's where their investigation turns from historical to cutting edge -- call it CSI: Titanic. Under a powerful microscope, they discovered those iron rivets that were recovered from the wreckage shared a big problem -- they were riddled with weak points from substandard material.

"We had 48 actual Titanic rivets that I first examined under a microscope, and I took very small pictures of the inside and I looked at the structure," McCarty said. "From a scientific standpoint, they were flawed, because of the way they were made."