I Study (Sometimes)

Carpathia received Titanic’s distress signal at 12:20am, April 15th, 1912. She was 58 miles away, a distance that absolutely could not be covered in less than four hours.

(Californian’s exact position at the time is…controversial. She was close enough to have helped. By all accounts she was close enough to see Titanic’s distress rockets. It’s uncertain to this day why her crew did not respond, or how many might not have been lost if she had been there. This is not the place for what-ifs. This is about what was done.)

Carpathia’s Captain Rostron had, yes, rolled out of bed instantly when woken by his radio operator, ordered his ship to Titanic’s aid and confirmed the signal before he was fully dressed. The man had never in his life responded to an emergency call. His goal tonight was to make sure nobody who heard that fact would ever believe it.

All of Carpathia’s lifeboats were swung out ready for deployment. Oil was set up to be poured off the side of the ship in case the sea turned choppy; oil would coat and calm the water near Carpathia if that happened, making it safer for lifeboats to draw up alongside her. He ordered lights to be rigged along the side of the ship so survivors could see it better, and had nets and ladders rigged along her sides ready to be dropped when they arrived, in order to let as many survivors as possible climb aboard at once.

I don’t know if his making provisions for there still being survivors in the water was optimism or not. I think he knew they were never going to get there in time for that. I think he did it anyway because, god, you have to hope.

Carpathia had three dining rooms, which were immediately converted into triage and first aid stations. Each had a doctor assigned to it. Hot soup, coffee, and tea were prepared in bulk in each dining room, and blankets and warm clothes were collected to be ready to hand out. By this time, many of the passengers were awake–prepping a ship for disaster relief isn’t quiet–and all of them stepped up to help, many donating their own clothes and blankets.

And then he did something I tend to refer to as diverting all power from life support.

Here’s the thing about steamships: They run on steam. Shocking, I know; but that steam powers everything on the ship, and right now, Carpathia needed power. So Rostron turned off hot water and central heating, which bled valuable steam power, to everywhere but the dining rooms–which, of course, were being used to make hot drinks and receive survivors. He woke up all the engineers, all the stokers and firemen, diverted all that steam back into the engines, and asked his ship to go as fast as she possibly could. And when she’d done that, he asked her to go faster.

I need you to understand that you simply can’t push a ship very far past its top speed. Pushing that much sheer tonnage through the water becomes harder with each extra knot past the speed it was designed for. Pushing a ship past its rated speed is not only reckless–it’s difficult to maneuver–but it puts an incredible amount of strain on the engines. Ships are not designed to exceed their top speed by even one knot. They can’t do it. It can’t be done.

Carpathia’s absolute do-or-die, the-engines-can’t-take-this-forever top speed was fourteen knots. Dodging icebergs, in the dark and the cold, surrounded by mist, she sustained a speed of almost seventeen and a half.

No one would have asked this of them. It wasn’t expected. They were almost sixty miles away, with icebergs in their path. They had a responsibility to respond; they did not have a responsibility to do the impossible and do it well. No one would have faulted them for taking more time to confirm the severity of the issue. No one would have blamed them for a slow and cautious approach. No one but themselves.

They damn near broke the laws of physics, galloping north headlong into the dark in the desperate hope that if they could shave an hour, half an hour, five minutes off their arrival time, maybe for one more person those five minutes would make the difference. I say: three people had died by the time they were lifted from the lifeboats. For all we know, in another hour it might have been more. I say they made all the difference in the world.

This ship and her crew received a message from a location they could not hope to reach in under four hours. Just barely over three hours later, they arrived at Titanic’s last known coordinates. Half an hour after that, at 4am, they would finally find the first of the lifeboats. it would take until 8:30 in the morning for the last survivor to be brought onboard. Passengers from Carpathia universally gave up their berths, staterooms, and clothing to the survivors, assisting the crew at every turn and sitting with the sobbing rescuees to offer whatever comfort they could.

In total, 705 people of Titanic’s original 2208 were brought onto Carpathia alive. No other ship would find survivors.

At 12:20am April 15th, 1912, there was a miracle on the North Atlantic. And it happened because a group of humans, some of them strangers, many of them only passengers on a small and unimpressive steam liner, looked at each other and decided: I cannot live with myself if I do anything less.

I may be the actual only human being on Tumblr with a post this popular that I not only don’t regret making, but am actually HAPPY whenever I notice a surge in its circulation. 

I never intended this to gain any traction at all (you’ll notice there’s no sources or anything–this was a personal ramble, prompted in good humor by a friend after I jokingly said that I wished someone would give me an excuse to cry about Carpathia on Tumblr so I could get it out of my system.) I literally expected to get, like, maybe 20 likes and a reblog, from friends, indulging me in my nonsense.

It just….means a lot to me that it’s touched so many people. I see a lot of tags to the effect of “HOW DARE YOU HURT ME LIKE THIS AND MAKE ME CRY ABOUT A BOAT” that are often really funny, but overwhelmingly the tags on this post are from people saving it for a rainy day, or remarking in a sort of quiet awe that they never even really thought about her role in the story–and God knows I never did, I learned it by complete accident much as most of the people who’ve found this post. 

And so many of you guys are taking strength and reassurance from the reminder not only that people are capable of amazing things together, but simply that kindness matters and that a simple, tiny act of compassion is never wasted. I’m just really glad to have been able to do that for some folks.

If I can just add one personal note. I need to emphasize something I only touched on in the original post.

I need to emphasize that Carpathia failed.

A lot of the tags and comments have a tinge of…despair, or guilt, or wistfulness about things like this happening so rarely. Or inadequacy, or just being overwhelmed or unhappy about not being in a position to step up in a comparable way. And I want to gently bring up the fact that this is still the sinking of the Titanic. 

They did not get there in time. They did not save the ship. It can be argued that they may not even have saved a single life; we have no way of knowing. This was still a horrific maritime disaster mired in arrogance and incompetence and a lack of care.

If the response to this story shows anything, it shows this: It matters that they tried. 

Even though they got there too late, even though the ship still sank. It matters that they tried. The difference between making the best reasonable speed after confirming the seriousness of the situation, and the miracle they pulled off–it matters. It makes all the difference. Even if it made no difference at all. Not one of you read this and concluded that I was stupid for caring so much when the Titanic still sank and all those people still died.

You don’t have to fix the world. You’ll likely be cold and sick and miserable and testy and scared, and unprepared, and in over your head, and entirely too small to be of any real use. It feels stupid, passing out blankets and coffee in the middle of an ice field knowing what just happened. It’s hard to feel anything but useless when all you can do is tap a wireless transmitter and promise help that you know will come too late.

15.04.20 || my semester starts next week and i will have all my classes online which i've jever had before. I'm nERVOUS and i still have so much to do and to read before classes start..

*takes 3000 Psychic damage*

*closes book*

Anti-elitism:

Criticizing class barriers to getting into academia

Criticizing lack of resources to help students with physical or mental health issues

Calling out racism and sexism in academia

Calling out people who treat others badly for being less educated

Calling out people who believe academia is the only way to gain knowledge

Anti-intellectualism:

Being opposed to academia as an institution

Acting like everyone in academia is a rich and privileged white man

Acting like their opinions shouldn’t matter because of this

Assuming that any specialised language exists only to make things difficult for a layperson to understand and couldn’t possibly be necessary in order to explain a complicated topic

Assuming that if a specialist can’t explain what they’re doing to a non-specialist in five minutes then what they do is nonsense

Shaming people for taking pride in their academic and intellectual achievements

Besides published academic papers are written with the expectation that the reader has at least some prior knowledge on the subject. They go through peer review and editing before they get published and most journals request clear wording in their submissions. Their language choice is an attempt to explain their point in the most clear and concise way possible to people already working and researching that field, because those are the people that are going to be able to use it. It might be a pain in the ass to read as a beginner, but you either work your way up to it or consult with someone more knowledge on the topic.

A lot of the jargon becomes much more useful or even necessary for conveying the details and nuance necessary for communicating about these things at higher levels and advancing in understanding.

I can explain to someone that I’m trying to figure out what was happening way back in the Jurassic + Triassic in northern British Columbia that made it a good place and time for certain gold-copper deposits to form.

But that doesn’t actually convey my research question as would be useful for people actually interested in the research (i.e. Was the lower Jurassic Big Bulk porphyry system emplaced in a local pull-apart basin and was its emplacement controlled by extensional structures, as recent work suggests is possible for other systems in the district and globally) , how I’m addressing it, the data that is needed for it etc.  

I can explain these, to a point, with simple language. But I am going to be using a lot of words to describe concepts that are better and more succinctly conveyed using jargon and at a certain point people’s eyes will glaze over anyway because I’m trying to introduce too many new concepts and ideas at once to them without giving them time to actually absorb and understand them.

If I can say things like thrust-fault related folding, porphyry deposits, unconformable/conformable and transtensional pull-apart basin and not have to explain what they mean I can actually get into the details of the data and what it means and what my findings are in a way that is far more useful to the people who might be interested in using my research.  Bad science writing exists (oh gods does it exist) but it’s not bad because jargon exists. It’s just bad writing that happens to also have jargon included.

The truth is that DIFFERENT writings/ presentations/ etc. are for DIFFERENT audiences. Not everything has to be or should be written for the layperson.

I’m a big believer in science outreach and I use completely different language depending on who I’m presenting to. BUT when communicating to the layperson I necessarily can’t communicate the amount of detail and nuance as I can to someone who has spent time absorbing and understanding the concepts underlying the jargon that makes up my field because I have to spend much of my time building up a scaffolding for the concepts I want to convey rather than starting from an already built scaffolding or adding furniture to an already built building.

This also means that in non-geological fields I also am not going to grasp the concepts and jargon at the same level as those actively working in those fields. 

And I am fine with this! I will engage with those fields as a lay person and understand that the picture I get from the simplified language used to communicate it to me is less complete and further from the “true” understanding that those in the field have.