After an entire century that included two high-profile government investigations1 and countless2 books and movies, we're still debating what really caused the Titanic3 to hit an iceberg4 and sink on that crystal-clear chilly5 night.
泰坦尼克号沉没一百周年之际，我们仍然在讨论是什么原因使它在如此晴朗而寒冷的夜晚撞上了冰山，沉没海底。这一百年间，关于沉船事故已经进行了两次知名的政府调查，还有无数的书籍和电影问世。
Maybe there's more to blame than human folly6 and hubris7（傲慢） . Maybe we can fault freak atmospheric8 conditions that caused a mirage9 or an even rarer astronomical10 event that sent icebergs11 into shipping12 lanes. Those are two of the newer theories being proposed by a Titanic author and a team of astronomers13.
New theories and research are important "but at its most basic what happened is they failed to heed14（注意，留心） warnings and they hit the iceberg because they were going too fast," said James Delgado, director of maritime15 heritage at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
One of the novel new theories says Titanic could have been the victim of a mirage that is similar to what people see in the desert. It's the brainchild of Tim Maltin, a historian who has written three books about Titanic.
The unusually cold sea air caused light to bend abnormally downward, Maltin said. The Titanic's first officer, William McMaster Murdoch, saw what he described as a "haze16 on the horizon, and that iceberg came right out of the haze," Maltin said, quoting from the surviving second officer's testimony17.
Other ships, including those rescuing survivors18, reported similar strange visuals and had trouble navigating19 around the icebergs, he said.
British meteorologists（气象学家） later monitored the site for those freaky thermal20 inversions21 and said 60 percent of the time they checked, the inversions were present, Maltin said.
The same inversions could have made the Titanic's rescue rockets appear lower in the sky, giving a rescue ship the impression that the Titanic was smaller and farther away, Maltin said.
Physicists22 Donald Olson and Russell Doescher at Texas State University have another theory in Sky &Telescope magazine that fits nicely with Maltin's. Olson — who often comes up with astronomical quirks23 linked to historical events — said that a few months earlier, the moon, sun and Earth lined up in a way that added extra pull on Earth's tides. The Earth was closer to the moon than it had been in 1,400 years.
The unusual tides caused glaciers24 to calve icebergs off Greenland. Those southbound（往南的） icebergs got stuck near Labrador and Newfoundland but then slowly moved south again, floating into the shipping currents just in time to greet the Titanic, the astronomers theorized. Maltin said the icebergs also added a snaking river of super-cold water that magnified the mirage effect.
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