Using the coast guard record and other data, the researchers also developed a computer simulation to examine the likely trajectories of icebergs in 1912. Using this model, they were able to trace the likely origin of the iceberg that sank the Titanic to southwest Greenland.

They suggest that it broke off a glacier in that area in early autumn 1911 and started off as a floating hunk measuring roughly 500m long and 300m deep.

Its mass by mid-April 1912 - as predicted by the computer model - agrees very closely with the size of an iceberg bearing a streak of red paint that was photographed by Captain William Squares DeCarteret of the Minia, a ship that joined the search for bodies and wreckage at the site of the disaster. //

"From the moment we left Belfast we had marvellous weather. Even when we got out on the western ocean - the Atlantic as you probably know it - it was as smooth as the proverbial millpond. Not a breath of wind and the sea like a sheet of glass.

In any other circumstances those conditions would have been ideal. But anyone with experience of ice at sea knows that those very conditions, and the moonless night, only render the detection of icebergs more difficult and call for the additional alertness of both officers and men."

-Charles Herbert Lightoller, second officer, RMS Titanic