TEAM REFUTES TITANIC THEORY : RESEARCHERS SAY THIN SLITS, NOT BIG GASH, SANK SHIP.

Byline: William J. Broad The New York Times

Hundreds of books have been written about the Titanic and why the opulent liner sank in 1912 on her inaugural voyage, taking some 1,500 lives in the worst maritime disaster of the day.

Everyone agrees that an iceberg was the proximate cause. But the nature of the damage that led to the appalling loss of life has stirred debate for 85 years, the issue sustained by a nightmarish sense of disbelief.

How could a ship so costly and so well constructed - the biggest and supposedly safest vessel then afloat, one hailed as unsinkable - turn out to be so extraordinarily otherwise? Why did the Titanic go down so fast? Was there no way to avoid the disaster?

A persistent theory is that the iceberg tore open a 300-foot gash in the side of the 900-foot-long luxury liner. But the ship was lost off Newfoundland in waters some 2-1/2 miles deep, and no author or naval detective was able to resolve the mystery.

Even after the liner was found in 1985, expeditions that probed the icy darkness of the deep sea tended to focus on the sheer spectacle of the ghost ship rather than the nature of the wound or wounds inflicted by the iceberg, partly because the bow was mired in mud, hiding the damage.

Now, an international team of scientists and engineers that repeatedly dived to the Titanic's remains last August is unveiling a surprise answer likely to end the long debate.

Peering through the mud with sound waves, the team found the damage to be astonishingly small - a series of six thin openings across the Titanic's starboard hull. The total area of the damage appears to be about 12 to 13 square feet, or less than the area of two sidewalk squares.

What doomed the ship was the unlucky placement of the six wounds across six watertight holds, the experts say. A different pattern of damage might have avoided the disaster that started late on April 14, 1912, a quiet Sunday evening notable for its clear sky, chilly air and calm sea.

``Titanic was a victim that night,'' William H. Garzke Jr., a naval architect who aided the analysis, said last week in an interview. ``Everything that could go wrong, did.''

Working with computer simulations of the disaster and metallurgic analysis of retrieved fragments of Titanic steel, the team also addressed how the ship flooded, broke in two and plunged to the bottom. Finally, the team investigated the likely fate of the rusting hulk in the decades ahead, examining the onslaught of metal-loving microbes.

The group of experts was assembled by the Discovery Channel, which visited the wreck during the monthlong expedition in August. The result, ``Titanic: Anatomy of a Disaster,'' a two-hour special, is to be broadcast Sunday night, the eve of the 85th anniversary of the disaster. Discovery and its French partner, Ellipse Programme, paid nearly $3 million to produce the program.

Garzke, a member of the Marine Forensics Panel of the Society of Naval Architects and Marine Engineers, a Jersey City group that advised the Discovery Channel on the investigation, was one of the expedition's main experts.

Another was David Livingstone, an official of Harland & Wolff in Belfast, Northern Ireland, the builder of the Titanic. It was the first time anyone from the company had descended to the broken hulk.

``The stern is a terrible mess,'' Livingstone said over an undersea microphone while exploring the wreck. But the bow, he added, ``is still a very beautiful structure.''

That remark was heard by a reporter who visited the expedition for about a week.

The opening of the Titanic to forensic analysis is part of a global trend in which the end of the Cold War is accelerating deep-sea exploration as former military personnel and technologies enter the civil sector and start to engage in commerce. In this case, the French government's submersible Nautile (French for Nautilus, the sea creature that dives into the deep) carried the investigators down to examine the ship's remains.

When the Titanic headed out across the Atlantic on April 11, 1912, she had every luxury: a gymnasium, cafes, squash courts, a swimming pool, Turkish baths, a barbershop and three libraries. The first-class lounge was styled after the palace at Versailles. The menu in the first-class dining saloon that fateful night included roast duckling, foie gras and Waldorf pudding.

After hitting the iceberg, the ship went down in a little more than 2-1/2 hours, and the 700 survivors gave conflicting accounts of what happened. Based on eyewitness reports, it was generally believed that hull damage extended from the first through the sixth of the ship's 16 watertight compartments.

The Titanic was designed to survive the flooding of three and possibly four compartments, depending on which ones filled up.

At the British inquiry in 1912, Edward Wilding, one of Harland & Wolff's naval architects, proposed that the uneven flooding in the six compartments meant each had suffered unique, uncontinuous damage. Wilding also proposed that the actual cuts might be relatively small. His testimony was widely ignored. Nearly everyone believed that the only thing that could undo a ship so big and well constructed was a huge gash.

CAPTION(S):

Photo, Map

Photo: (Color) No caption (Titanic)

Map: (Color) Wreck of Titanic