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The Dinosaurs Were Not Alone

<p>
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<img alt="dinosaur painting" class="richtext-image full-width" src="https://staging.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/media/images/dinosaurs-were-not-alone-01.width-990_7zmIqv1.jpg"/>
<figcaption>For their sheer size, diversity, and longevity, the dinosaurs tend to overshadow other organisms that existed when they did. But they were far from alone.
        
        <div class="credit">© Mike Kiev/iStockphoto</div>
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</p>
<p>
	"If we want to understand the environment dinosaurs came from and why they succeeded, we have to use all the information available to us," says Kevin Padian, Professor of Integrative Biology at the University of California at Berkeley. Richard Stucky of the Denver Museum of Natural History agrees. "We want to know what dinosaurs were like, how they interacted with one another, and what kinds of communities they lived in. Studying the environment can give us important clues."</p>
<p>
	But finding and piecing together these clues is tricky. It is the rare living thing that becomes a fossil in death. The vast majority of organisms, whether they be plants, animals or insects, simply decompose. But sometimes, if conditions are just right, an organism can be preserved for millions of years. Find out how some ancient organisms beat the clock—and what role they may have played in the lives of the dinosaurs.</p>
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<figure class="richtext-image full-width">
<img alt="marine reptile fossil" class="richtext-image full-width" src="https://staging.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/media/images/dinosaurs-were-not-alone-02.width-990_1ycUGG5.jpg"/>
<figcaption>This specimen of <span class="science-term">Keichosaurus hui</span>, a Triassic reptile that lived in shallow marine environments, has been preserved for over 200 million years.
        
        <div class="credit">© Marcio Silva/iStockphoto</div>
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<h3>
	Animals</h3>
<p>
	The first step towards fossilization for vertebrates, or animals with backbones, is rapid burial in sediment. One scenario might be a drowned animal that washes downstream and lodges into a riverbank, where it quickly becomes covered in sand or mud. The animal's soft parts, namely its flesh and organs, rot away, while sediments surround and protect the animal's hard parts—its bones and teeth. Over time, mineral-rich water percolates through the bone's tiny pores and, gradually, the bones absorb these minerals and turn to stone. But this is only the beginning. For a fossil to survive through time, the surrounding rock must withstand the forces of erosion and tectonic activity as well.</p>
<p>
	The fossil record reveals that dinosaurs first appeared in the Triassic Period, between 250 to 213 million years ago. It also indicates that the first turtle, the first salamander, and the first frog appeared in the Triassic, as did the first crocodilian reptile, the phytosaur. On land, mammals also made their debut during this period, in the form of small insect-and-seed-eating critters that scurried around the forest underbrush. Knowing the vertebrate players is important, according to Kevin Padian, because it gives insight into how dinosaurs may have gotten their first toehold in their climb to supremacy. "It's pretty clear that the first dinosaurs weren't directly competing with other animals for food," he says. "Phytosaurs were in the water eating mainly fish, and there were reptilian herbivores on land, like some of the aetosaurs. But early dinosaurs were small bipedal carnivores, meaning they had their hands free and ate meat. So they did very well."</p>
<p>
<figure class="richtext-image full-width">
<img alt="fossil leaf" class="richtext-image full-width" src="https://staging.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/media/images/dinosaurs-were-not-alone-03.width-990_lkeYKa7.jpg"/>
<figcaption>Fossil leaves and fossil bones are rarely found together, which makes recreating relationships between plants and animals of long ago a challenging task.
        
        <div class="credit">© Kun Jiang/iStockphoto</div>
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</p>
<h3>
	Plants</h3>
<p>
	Figuring out the relationship between plants and dinosaurs can be revealing, but it is difficult to do. The problem is not for a lack of specimens. Plant fossils easily outnumber bone fossils, and they come in many more forms. The billions and billions of tons of coal in the world are ancient plant remains, as are compressed leaves, leaf imprints, pollen grains, and pieces of fossilized wood. The difficulty is that bone fossils and plant fossils are rarely found at the same site.</p>
<p>
	"It has to do with the chemical conditions that favor preservation of bones as opposed to those that favor the preservation of plant matter," says Scott Wing, Curator in the Department of Paleobiology at the Smithsonian's Museum of Natural History. "Plant matter is preserved best in an acidic environment, like in a peat bog. Whereas bones, having a lot of calcium in them, are essentially demineralized by acidic conditions. If you drop a bone in a bog, it gets rubbery, loses its calcium, and it's difficult for it to be preserved. Conversely, if you take a piece of plant and drop it in a nice alkaline soil where a bone would likely be preserved, the plant is going to be degraded, not only by the chemical conditions but also by all organisms that live in the soil."</p>
<blockquote>
	Insects may have competed directly with herbivorous dinosaurs for food.</blockquote>
<p>
	Despite this wrinkle, plant groups of the Mesozoic are well known. The major players were conifers, a tree similar to today's Norfolk Island pines; cycads, a palm-like tree with leathery leaves and great big cones that still grow in some tropical areas; bennettitales, an extinct group of plants that had leaves like cycads but were more closely related to flowering plants; and ferns, which were more varied and abundant than they are today. Flowering plants, or angiosperms, first appeared near the end of the Mesozoic, around 144 million years ago, and they quickly took hold, constituting nine-tenths of all known plant species by the end of the period. Grass, so common today, was non-existent.</p>
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<img alt="" class="richtext-image full-width" src="https://staging.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/media/images/dinosaurs-were-not-alone-04.width-990_Oh0x8ee.jpg"/>
<figcaption>A coprolite, or piece of fossilized dung such as this plop from a dinosaur, can be good indicator of what a certain animal ate—but usually only if it's found within the fossil gut of the animal itself.
        
        <div class="credit">© Anton Foltin/iStockphoto</div>
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<p>
	If plant fossils and dinosaur fossils tend not to turn up together, how do paleontologists know what herbivorous dinosaurs ate? "You use some manner of correlation," says Peter Dodson, Professor of Anatomy and Geology at the University of Pennsylvania. "Some of the large, important fossil deposits of the American and Canadian West are geographically quite widespread. So you find bones and skeletons in one place, and maybe a few miles away you find rich plant deposits. You build up a picture from all the material that's available from different geographical localities." Richard Stucky concurs: "Oftentimes you get sites with specimens above and below the time period you're looking at, and you can extrapolate that a particular critter or plant lived through the period you're interested in."</p>
<p>
	Another source of information on dinosaur diets, albeit a rare one, is coprolites, or fossilized dung. "Coprolites give information about what one particular individual was eating, but you don't usually know what genus or even what species was producing the coprolite unless you find it inside a dinosaur skeleton," says Scott Wing. "In general, it's a pretty speculative endeavor. You've got your plant fossils, and you've got your dinosaur fossils—and they're often not from the same places or even from the same times. We can track changes in plants through time, and we can track changes in dinosaurs through time, but we don't have any very good way of establishing cause and effect. So the real answer to 'What did dinosaurs eat?' is that, most of the time, we don't know."</p>
<p>
<figure class="richtext-image full-width">
<img alt="fossil dragonfly" class="richtext-image full-width" src="https://staging.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/media/images/dinosaurs-were-not-alone-05.width-990_SpEaKXo.jpg"/>
<figcaption>While growing, the number of researchers who study fossil insects, such as this dragonfly, is few.
        
        <div class="credit">© Amanda Rohde/iStockphoto</div>
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</p>
<h3>
	Insects</h3>
<p>
	Insects are perhaps the least understood organisms of the Mesozoic. Conrad Labandeira, a research scientist specializing in fossil insects at the National Museum of Natural History, explains that this is due, in part, to their sheer number. "Estimates of modern insect species range from about 5 million to 30 million," he says. "For vertebrates, including fish, it's about 80,000 or 90,000. One of the consequences of there being so many more insects living today is that their proportional 'know-ability' in the past is less. The other issue is that there are so few people studying them." Aside from a colleague in Canada and a small cadre of scientists in Russia, Labandeira is alone in his work.</p>
<p>
	Ideal conditions for preserving insects are different from those that preserve plants or bones. An insect's exoskeleton is made out of a substance called chitin. "You know when you step on a cockroach or beetle? That snap is chitin," says Labandeira. "And chitin is best preserved when it's entombed in very fine-grained sediments." Typically, insects destined for fossilization were ones that got washed into a stagnant body of water like a lake or pond, where they quickly became buried. Mummification in fossil tree resin or amber, popularized in Steven Spielberg's film <cite>Jurassic Park</cite>, is a less common method of preservation and only appears in the fossil record after 125 million years ago. "I don't know why that is," says Labandeira. "One possibility is that wood boring insects really didn't savage trees until then, but it's really a mystery."</p>
<p>
	The story of ancient insects really begins in the period preceding dinosaurs—in the Paleozoic Era, between 590 to 248 million years ago. Insects with piercing and sucking mouthparts, primitive grasshopper-like bugs, and giant dragonflies flourished, as did the primordial ancestors of modern insects. But the Permian Extinction at the end of the Paleozoic wiped out most of these insects, not to mention a number of other life-forms.</p>
<p>
	The insects that survived into the Mesozoic are basically the insects that we know today. "If you were plopped down into the Cretaceous by a time machine, and you had a basic entomology textbook with the keys to the families, you probably wouldn't have much trouble finding your way around," says Labandeira. "There'd be a few things you'd have trouble with—a few extinct groups like the <span class="science-term">Kalligrafmatidae</span>, which had butterfly-like wings, or the flea-sized <span class="science-term">Saurophthirius</span>, which had small antennae and a pump on top if its head that inflated like a balloon to create negative suction to pull up, we think, blood." Labandeira is quick to point out that these creatures may still exist today somewhere in the tropics, but because of our poor knowledge of insects, they may have gone undetected.</p>
<p>
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<img alt="ants in amber" class="richtext-image full-width" src="https://staging.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/media/images/dinosaurs-were-not-alone-06.width-990_8Lxb0sI.jpg"/>
<figcaption>Amber, or fossil tree resin, often preserves organisms, including these ancient ants, in the exact postures they had when they got stuck in the resin.
        
        <div class="credit">© Paul Mckeown/iStockphoto</div>
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</p>
<p>
	Despite their relatively small size, insects played a very big role in the lives of dinosaurs, evidence suggests. In fact, insects may have competed directly with herbivorous dinosaurs for food. "That's certainly been an important question in modern ecosystems," says Labandeira. "In grasslands, vertebrates probably outperform insects in terms of consumption of plant material, but in all other ecosystems, it looks like it's the other way around." Insects may have played a role in recycling dinosaur waste. A researcher named Karen Chin recently looked at cross-sections of dinosaur coprolites and found structures within that indicated the presence of scarab beetles that were probably feeding on the dung. Insects also may have been responsible for transporting diseases like malaria and dysentery, but Labandeira admits this possibility is purely speculative.</p>

Explore a colorful cast of animals, plants, and insects that lived alongside the dinosaurs.

Dealing with the Deluge

<p>
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<img alt="Yellow River in China" class="richtext-image full-width" src="https://staging.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/media/images/dealing-deluge-01.width-990_Ak9Y1nK.jpg"/>
<figcaption>The Yellow River, which snakes its way across 3,000 miles of China, has given rise to catastrophic floods killing millions of people.
        
        <div class="credit">© Xidong Luo/iStock</div>
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</p>
<h3>
	The Yellow River</h3>
<p>
	China has had a particularly long and terrible history of flooding. In the last 2000 years, the Yangtze River has flooded more than 1000 times. But it is the Hwang Ho or "Yellow River" that has been responsible for China's most catastrophic floods. Three thousand miles long, it begins high above sea level in the northern mountain province of Qinghai and ends at the Yellow Sea. Westerners have dubbed it "China's Sorrow," because over the centuries it has killed more people than any other river in the world. In 1887 flooding killed nearly two million people, in 1931 the death toll was almost four million, and in 1938 it was almost one million.</p>
<p>
	Much of the problem stems from the high silt content of the river—in some stretches as much as 60% by weight. Millions of tons of yellow mud choke the channel, causing the river to overflow and change course. In its lower reaches, the river bed has actually become higher than the level of the surrounding countryside. Water is held in by dikes of ever increasing height, some reaching 30 feet and more.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>
		Even with enlightened practices, there is truly no way to eradicate flooding of the Mississippi—or any other river.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>
	Attempts at controlling the Yellow River were begun as early as the third century B.C. An engineer named Yu came up with the idea of dredging the river to encourage the water to flow in its proper channel. Yu was made Emperor of China for his contribution, but managing the river's silt would continue to be an ongoing challenge.</p>
<p>
	Over the years, the Chinese have tried to control the Yellow River by building higher levees, digging channels and building dams. Dams have tended to be the most helpful in controlling floods, but the river's thick silt has clogged many of them. Currently, the Chinese are constructing a massive new dam called the Xiaolangdi Multipurpose Dam Project. Boasting 10 intake towers, nine flood and sediment tunnels, six power tunnels and an underground powerhouse, the structure may finally mitigate "China's Sorrow."</p>
<h3>
	The Nile River</h3>
<p>
	The Egyptians have had a very different relationship with the Nile. For thousands of years, they referred to its annual flooding as the "Gift of the Nile." Each summer, like clockwork, the river would take possession of a strip of land on either side of its banks. When the water receded, a very thin, evenly spread layer of black mud was left behind. Farmers would immediately plant their crops—never needing fertilizers because the flood soil was so rich.</p>
<p>
<figure class="richtext-image full-width">
<img alt="Nile River" class="richtext-image full-width" src="https://staging.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/media/images/dealing-deluge-02.width-990_9ybtwiI.jpg"/>
<figcaption>Today's engineers, using aerial imagery of the Nile, have a more detailed understanding of the topography that causes periodic flooding.
        
        <div class="credit">NASA</div>
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</p>
<p>
	This narrow strip along the Nile, together with the delta at the river's northern mouth, is the only farm land Egypt has. Though it totals only three percent of the county's land, it has provided ample food for thousands of years. But recently, a population boom has forced Egyptians to increase their agricultural output.</p>
<p>
	In 1970, they completed the Aswan High Dam, which stretches across the Nile 600 miles south of Cairo. The dam has effectively stopped the river's annual floods by trapping its waters in a reservoir that is slowly released during the dry season.</p>
<p>
	Now farmers along the Nile plant crops year round. In fact, the area has become one of the most intensely cultivated pieces of land in the world. Because the Aswan Dam traps 98% of the river's rich sediments and prevents them from flowing downstream, farmers along the Nile must now use large amounts of artificial fertilizer. Another negative side-effect of the dam is that the Nile delta is no longer being built up by the river sediments. As a result, this important agricultural area is now struggling with erosion and dangerously high levels of soil salinity.</p>
<h3>
	The Mississippi River</h3>
<p>
	Beginning as a trickle in northern Minnesota, the Mississippi flows nearly 2,400 miles south to the Gulf of Mexico. Along the way, it draws water from thousands of tributaries across 31 states and two Canadian provinces. The Mississippi River valley is one of the world's most fertile, providing food and jobs for millions. The river is also a superhighway for commerce, moving 50 billion dollars worth of goods through America's heartland every year.</p>
<p>
<figure class="richtext-image full-width">
<img alt="flooded Mississippi" class="richtext-image full-width" src="https://staging.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/media/images/dealing-deluge-03.width-990_1D9td5Y.jpg"/>
<figcaption>The flood of 1993 left many areas of the Midwest submerged for weeks.
        
        <div class="credit">© niknikon/iStock</div>
</figcaption>
</figure>
</p>
<p>
	Flooding is nothing new for the Mississippi, which has regularly overrun its banks for tens of thousands of years. What has changed over the past 100 years is the number of people effected by these natural upheavals.</p>
<p>
	After a disastrous flood in 1927, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers was charged with task of taming the mighty Mississippi. In building the longest system of levees in the world, the Corps successfully minimized flooding and improved the river's navigability. This dramatic achievement spurred millions of Americans to move onto the floodplain, where the soil was fertile and the property was cheap. As a result, much of the river's bordering wetlands have been lost to agriculture and construction.</p>
<p>
	Today, the Mississippi is outfitted with 29 locks and dams, hundreds of runoff canals, and miles and miles of levees. Most years, the system works remarkably well, but the flood of 1993 washed away the illusion of complete control. Fully 80% of private earthen levees in the river basin failed. Most federal levees held, saving lives and land—but sent torrents of water towards less protected field and towns.</p>
<p>
	The '93 flood rekindled an old debate: what to do about the loss of the river's natural floodplain. Originally, the waters of the Mississippi spread over many thousand square miles of lowlands. Unlike cultivated farmland, wetlands possess a sponge-like quality that absorbs excess water in times of flooding. Today the Mississippi is largely confined to its immediate channel, and the increased runoff from the surrounding land makes the river even more vulnerable to overflowing. Much of the public debate has focused on encouraging farming practices that improve soil absorption properties and allowing some of the land along the Mississippi to revert to its former wetland state. But even with these enlightened practices, there is truly no way to eradicate flooding of the Mississippi—or any other river.</p>

The Mississippi, Nile, and Yellow Rivers are prone to disastrous flooding. How have engineers tried to stop it?

RMS Titanic departing Southampton on 10 April 1912. Image Credit:  F.G.O. Stuart

An Unsinkable Ship?

<div class="related"></div>
<p> "You can have all the safety in the world and it's not going to help you if you hit a bomb," points out Dr. Robert Ballard, who recently explored the wreck of the ocean liner <i>Britannic,</i> which sank during World War I off the coast of Greece, the victim of either a bomb or a torpedo. The sinking of <i>Britannic</i> was especially tragic—not only because it followed so closely the sinking of its sister ship, <i>Titanic</i>, in 1912, but because extensive safety improvements had been made to the ship to avoid just such a repeat disaster.</p><p>While bombings are no longer a daily threat for most ships, danger still lurks in the form of fires, groundings, collisions and worse. So engineers, designers and human systems analysts are continually devising new ways to keep ships where they belong—on, not under, the water.</p>
<figure class="richtext-image full-width">
<img alt="White Star Line poster of Titanic" class="richtext-image full-width" src="https://staging.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/media/images/unsinkable-ship-01.width-990_7OSd7Wh.jpg"/>
<figcaption>The most famous "unsinkable" ship of all, <em>Titanic</em>, as promoted by the White Star Line in a period poster
        
    </figcaption>
</figure>
<h3>Recent Innovations</h3><p>Surprisingly, structural safety design has changed very little since the days of the pre-World War I luxury liners. Modern day cruise ships have more or less the same safety features that the <i>Britannic</i> had. What <i>has</i> changed, however, is the execution of those designs.</p><p>For example, both the <i>Britannic</i> and the <i>Titanic</i> had reinforced steel hulls. But recent research suggests the steel might have been of poor quality, making it dangerously brittle under stress. Today, materials engineers use computers to model the stresses on ship hulls and formulate steel able to withstand those stresses.</p>
<figure class="richtext-image full-width">
<img alt="computer image of Britannic hull" class="richtext-image full-width" src="https://staging.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/media/images/unsinkable-ship-02.width-990_kWLMRfa.jpg"/>
<figcaption>In the investigation of the <em>Britannic</em> shipwreck, Ballard's team modeled how the great steel hull might have been vulnerable.
        
        <div class="credit">© WGBH Educational Foundation</div>
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<p>Watertight compartments, or hull divisions, are another safety feature from the days of the <i>Britannic</i> that have carried over to modern cruise ships. If a puncture occurs, the idea is to contain and isolate the incoming water—and keep the ship afloat until help can arrive. The concept was proved sound when the <i>Olympic,</i> yet another sister ship to <i>Titanic</i> and <i>Britannic,</i> received a 34 foot gash in its hull from a collision at sea. With one of it compartments filled with water, the ship was able to limp back to port.</p><p>If disaster does strike, the chances of help arriving in time to minimize casualties are better today than ever before.</p><p>"Those were such good innovations that we stay with them," explains Dr. Owen F. Hughes, a naval architect at the Virginia Polytechnic Institute, "We would never do away with them." The newly completed 51,000 ton cruise liner, <i>Carnival Destiny</i>, has 18 watertight compartments. Two can be filled with water and the ship will still float.</p>
<figure class="richtext-image full-width">
<img alt="Britannic blue print of hull" class="richtext-image full-width" src="https://staging.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/media/images/unsinkable-ship-03.width-990_GMFv3Ti.jpg"/>
<figcaption><em>Brittanic</em>'s hull had 15 watertight compartments as well as a double hull along the engine and boiler rooms.
        
        <div class="credit">© WGBH Educational Foundation</div>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>This concept of containment has recently been expanded and applied to fire, the most common cause of disaster at sea. "We now require structural fire protection," explains Commander Van Haverbeke of the United States Coast Guard. "The vessel needs to be both subdivided and built of non-combustible material, so if a fire does start in a certain area, the spread is limited." In the days of the <i>Titanic</i> and <i>Britannic</i>, few fire regulations existed at all.</p>
<div class="ad"></div>
<h3>The Human Element</h3><p>Even the best safety innovations can't keep a ship afloat if the features are used incorrectly—or not at all. Evidence from Dr. Ballard's recent exploration of the <i>Britannic</i> wreck suggests that when disaster struck the ship in the form of a mine or torpedo, the doors that divided the hull into watertight compartments were, for some reason, left open. Also left open were the lower portholes, further defeating the integrity of the hull. Whether closed doors and portholes would have saved the <i>Britannic</i> from sinking is anybody's guess, but as Ballard points out, "You can have all sorts of safety technology, but if some idiot turns the doggone stuff off, so much for design."</p>
<figure class="richtext-image full-width">
<img alt="watertight compartment door" class="richtext-image full-width" src="https://staging.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/media/images/unsinkable-ship-04.width-990_SgFwt3c.jpg"/>
<figcaption>Left open, <em>Britannic</em>'s supposedly watertight doors were as good as non-existent.
        
        <div class="credit">© WGBH Educational Foundation</div>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>From capsizings to groundings of large oil tankers, human error is almost always the culprit behind the worst accidents at sea. In 1987, Britain's <i>Herald of Free Enterprise</i> ferry left port with one of its cargo doors wide open. The ship, known as a "ro-ro," was designed to roll vehicles on one end of the ship and off the other, thereby minimizing time in port. Ironically, the <i>Herald of Free Enterprise</i> was chock-full of sophisticated safety equipment, but none of it addressed the simple possibility of someone forgetting to close the bow door. Water surging across the cargo deck ended up capsizing the ferry in shallow water.</p><p>The real trick is keeping boats out of trouble in the first place.</p><p>To reduce these types of accidents, the U.S. Coast Guard and other international agencies have begun to focus more and more on the human element in ship safety. Commander Van Haverbeke explains, "One of our primary projects is what we call 'prevention through people'. It's the recognition that the majority of casualties have their root in the human element. Can we make ships safer? Yes. Can we do it all by technology? I think there is a vast area for improvement by focusing on the way people are using the ships they already have and operating them more safely."</p><p>Part of this means understanding and accepting a given ship's limitations. For example, the "ro-ro" ferry design is extremely efficient for channel crossings, but is not well suited for transit in heavy seas. This became abundantly clear in 1994, when a huge wave ripped the bow door right off the <i>Estonia</i> near the coast of Finland. The ferry capsized, and eight-hundred and thirty-four passengers were killed. As a result, "ro-ro" ferries are no longer used in heavy weather, and many companies have welded their bow doors permanently shut.</p>
<figure class="richtext-image full-width">
<img alt="" class="richtext-image full-width" src="https://staging.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/media/images/unsinkable-ship-05.width-990_dbFPPur.jpg"/>
<figcaption>German artist Willy Stí¶wer depicted the plight of <em>Titanic</em>'s passengers, unable to all find space in the ship's lifeboats. (The icebergs in the painting are inaccuracies, but the desperate drama was no doubt real.)
        
    </figcaption>
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<h3>Saving Lives</h3><p>When the <i>Titanic</i> sank after hitting an iceberg, there weren't enough lifeboats for the number of people on board. By the time the <i>Britannic</i> set sail, two years later, ships were required to carry enough lifeboats to accommodate all on board. This addition helped save the lives of most of those aboard the <i>Britannic.</i> According to Dr. Hughes, lifeboat technology has continued to evolve. "Lifeboats are much easier to launch now. And they've doubled the capacity. So if a ship is heeling and you can only launch boats on one side, you still have enough." New types of evacuation slides are also beginning to be deployed.</p><p>If disaster does strike, the chances of help arriving in time to minimize casualties are better today than ever before. Advanced communications and navigation technology allow the Coast Guard and other rescue agencies to pinpoint ships in distress quickly and accurately. According to Commander Van Haverbeke, "We have rapidly cut down on the loss of life due to delays in getting the rescue there."</p><p>One ship the Coast Guard uses for rescue missions in severe weather is the remarkable 47-foot Motor Lifeboat, which is about as close to "unsinkable" as any vessel currently at sea. Able to travel at speeds of up to 25 knots through 30-foot surf, the boat carries a small, but extremely hardy crew of four. Not only does the vessel ride high on the water, so much so that its passengers feel every swell—but it can capsize completely, and within eight seconds, return automatically to an upright position. A series of ballast compartments in the hull force the ship to float upright.</p>
<figure class="richtext-image full-width">
<img alt="Coast Guard Motor Lifeboat" class="richtext-image full-width" src="https://staging.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/media/images/unsinkable-ship-06.width-990_1UA3SFV.jpg"/>
<figcaption>The U.S. Coast Guard's 47-foot Motor Lifeboat in action off the coast of Hatteras, North Carolina
        
        <div class="credit">© U.S. Coast Guard, photo by Petty Officer 3rd Class Bob Gross</div>
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<p>"If you get seasick, this isn't the boat for you," laughs Tom Goodearl, former Boatswain's Mate with the U.S. Coast Guard. "It rides like a cork on the waves and really throws you around. You get very wet, but it's exhilarating. It does give you a real feel for how heavy water is and what the ocean can do."</p><p>In January of 1996, a tug boat towing a large oil barge off Rhode Island exploded, throwing six crew members overboard in high seas. Much publicity came from the giant oil leak that resulted. But less publicized was the rescue team that went out in the severe weather and saved all six lives using the Motor Lifeboat.</p><h3>Prevention</h3><p>While all these innovations help, the real trick is keeping boats out of trouble in the first place. This is perhaps where advanced technology has had the biggest impact. Radar can give ships a visual picture of where they are and what other ships are in the area. Better weather forecasting can guide ships away from hurricanes and severe weather altogether. GPS and other navigation systems can pinpoint a ship's exact location. Iceberg patrols can warn ships out of harm's way. And advanced satellite communications systems can transmit information at sea greater distances than ever before.</p><p>So even though there's no such thing as an unsinkable ship, seafarers can rest assured that their chances of making it to shore have improved considerably in recent years.</p>
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<p>The Titanic made a mockery of the notion, yet naval engineers have devised key innovations to safeguard modern ships.</p>

Kate Hudec

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