18. The iceberg that sunk the Titanic had floated from Greenland and had been thousands of years in the making.
It’s believed that the iceberg that sunk the Titanic broke off from the Qassimuit mass of south-west Greenland in 1908, and it may have been formed by snow that fell some 100,000 years ago. It floated around that region for a few years, slowly melting, before it started heading south at the beginning of 1912. By the time it reached the Atlantic shipping lanes, it was around 400 feet in length and towered 100 feet above the ocean surface. This means it most probably weighed a massive 1.5 million tonnes. The iceberg was spotted by ships that came to the Titanic’s rescue in the following days – according to some crewmen, it had a strip of red paint down one side.