It was a moonless night. James Bisset, the second officer of the steamship RMS Carpathia, peered out across a chilly North Atlantic. The sea was calm, there was no wind. Above him, the effervescent aurora borealis danced in the sky. And roughly 100 kilometers away, a much larger ship—the RMS Titanic—was heading for disaster. It was April 1912, and the world’s most well-known maritime catastrophe was about to unfold.
The Titanic’s sinking caused the deaths of around 1,500 people, a disaster that has been portrayed in countless books, films, and TV series. Historians have picked over the incident for more than a century. But a new theory has recently emerged that could help explain what happened.
“Most people who write about Titanic, they don’t know that northern lights were seen on that night,” asserts independent weather researcher Mila Zinkova, a retired computer programmer, who lives in San Francisco, California. Zinkova recently published an article in the journal Weather in which she put forth a novel idea: a blast of electromagnetic radiation from the sun slammed into the Earth, lighting up the sky with the aurora and interfering with the compasses and radio equipment aboard the Titanic and nearby vessels. It is well known that solar ejections can influence compass needles and cause radio interference.
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