Titanic Northern Lights, ship’s navigational and radio equipment

 Titanic Northern Lights, ship’s navigational and radio equipment.


The R.M.S. Titanic sank on a moonless night in April 1912—but the sky wasn’t completely dark. Instead, the Northern Lights shimmered green overhead.

Formed when the charged particles of a particularly strong solar storm hit Earth’s magnetic field, exciting oxygen and nitrogen in the upper atmosphere, the Northern Lights, or aurora borealis, illuminate the sky in a stunning display of swirling colors.

As Mindy Weisberger reports for Live Science, the solar storms responsible for this light show can disrupt magnetic signals and radio waves. Such interference, argues independent Titanic researcher Mila Zinkova in a newly published paper, may have contributed to the luxury liner’s untimely demise.

Writing in the journal Weather, Zinkova outlines evidence linking the Titanic’s sinking to the celestial lights. Among other factors, she points out that the solar storm’s charged particles could have thrown off the ship’s compass, placing it on a collision course with the iceberg widely blamed for the disaster.

“Even if the compass moved only one degree, it already could have made a difference,” Zinkova, who is a retired computer programmer, tells Hakai magazine’s Chris Baraniuk.

Frederic Church painting of Northern Lights
“There was no moon, but the Aurora Borealis glimmered like moonbeams shooting up from the northern horizon,” wrote James Bisset, an officer stationed on the Carpathia, of the night of April 14. (Public domain via Wikimedia Commons)

James Bisset, an officer assigned to the R.M.S. Carpathia, which rescued 705 survivors from the sinking Titanic, described the April 14 light show in his logbook.

“There was no moon, but the Aurora Borealis glimmered like moonbeams shooting up from the northern horizon,” he wrote, as quoted by Live Science.

Five hours later, Bisset added that he could see “greenish beams” as the ship approached the Titanic’s lifeboats.

Another witness of the night’s events, survivor Lawrence Beesley, later noted that the aurora borealis’ glow “arched fanwise across the northern sky, with faint streamers reaching toward the Pole-star.”

According to NASA, solar storms known as coronal mass ejections send a wave of electrified particles into space. When Earth is caught in the wave, the charged particles travel along the planet’s magnetic field, interacting with oxygen, which produces red and green light, and nitrogen, which generates blue and purple light.

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