5D Colin McCown How the Titanic Changed Modern Ships

For marine educators like Capt. Christopher Hearn, the lessons of the Titanic have threaded through the decades in a symbolic and practical way.

It might seem impossible, but there's one thing even James Cameron's budget can't quite do: build an unsinkable ship. Over at Scientific American they spoke with Henry Petroski, author of To Forgive Design: Understanding Failure. All designs have flaws, he says, and here are some of the ways in which even our modern ships can go down.

While bombings are no longer a daily threat for most ships, danger still lurks in the form of fires, groundings, collisions and worse

"It will be every bit as luxurious as the original Titanic, but ... will have state-of-the-art 21st-century technology and the latest navigation and safety systems," Palmer said in a statement. He called the project "a tribute to the spirit of the men and women who worked on the original Titanic

The first SOLAS convention addressed the proximate cause of the Titanic disaster: the danger of icebergs near the Grand Banks off the Newfoundland coast. The international agreement called for regular ice patrols, funded by a consortium of seafaring nations and carried out by the U.S. Those patrols, which continue today, have kept watch on the icebergs floating over the underwater plateau of the Banks, where transatlantic shipping routes cross the path of icebergs drifting down from Greenland.

When the Titanic collided with the iceberg, the hull steel and the wrought iron rivets failed because of brittle fracture. A type of catastrophic failure in structural materials, brittle fracture occurs without prior plastic deformation and at extremely high speeds. The causes of brittle fracture include low temperature, high impact loading, and high sulphur content. On the night of the Titanic disaster, each of these three factors was present: The water temperature was below freezing, the Titanic was travelling at a high speed on impact with the iceberg, and the hull steel contained high levels of sulphur.