A ship that sent a warning about Titanic's iceberg before the ocean liner drowned was identified as lying in the Irish Sea.
In 1912, the Mesaba merchant ship crossed the Atlantic and delivered a radio message to Titanic to save him. The ship received a message. Later that night, a supposedly unsinkable Titanic hit an iceberg and drowned during his first flight, killing 1,500 lives. SS Mesaba remained a merchant vessel for the next six years.
Using a modern multibeam hydrolocator, researchers at Bangor University were finally able to accurately identify the sunken ship and discovered its location for the first time.
For a marine archaeologist, a multi-beam hydrolocator may be as effective as an aerial photograph for landscape archaeology. The device allows for the display of the seabed with such detail that it is possible to detect the details of the superstructure on the hydrologic images.
SS Mesaba was one of 273 sunken ships on the 1,270 km2 of the Irish Sea that scanned and compared to the database of sunken ships of the British Hydrography Department and other sources.