At the bottom of the Aegean lie vital clues to the cause of Titanic’s doom

A sunken giant at the bottom of the Kea Strait is helping to solve the mysteries of the Titanic’s loss, while creating a new underwater museum for divers

Video clip from a Britannic dive, Courtesy Derk Remmers via Kea Divers

KEA, Greece - A hundred years after she sank in the Aegean, Titanic’s sister-ship shed light on what sent the doomed ocean liner to the bottom of the Atlantic and creating a new diving industry in Greece.

Britannic was serving as a World War One hospital ship when she struck a German mine five kilometres off the island of Kea, 60km southeast of Athens, in November 1916. She sank in just 55 minutes.

As the centenary of that sinking approached, applications for diving permits soared and the Greek government wanted the 49,000-tonne wreck, the largest in the world, to become the centrepiece of a series of marine museums across the country.

“[It] will be the first underwater historical museum in Greece with international importance,” said Angeliki Simosi, head of Greece’s underwater antiquities department.

The reason for this is that Britannic may hold the key to how and why Titanic sank four years before her. Britannic’s keel was laid just five months before Titanic was launched at the Harland & Wolff shipyards in Belfast. She was barely taking shape when her older sister went down, and the disaster threw the shipyard into a crisis of confidence.