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Madeira Wildfire Brought under Control after 11 Days

Smoke rises as a wildfire burns at Curral das Freiras, Madeira, Portugal August 17, 2024, in this screen grab obtained from a social media video. netmadeira.com/via REUTERS /File Photo Purchase Licensing Rights
Smoke rises as a wildfire burns at Curral das Freiras, Madeira, Portugal August 17, 2024, in this screen grab obtained from a social media video. netmadeira.com/via REUTERS /File Photo Purchase Licensing Rights
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Madeira Wildfire Brought under Control after 11 Days

Smoke rises as a wildfire burns at Curral das Freiras, Madeira, Portugal August 17, 2024, in this screen grab obtained from a social media video. netmadeira.com/via REUTERS /File Photo Purchase Licensing Rights
Smoke rises as a wildfire burns at Curral das Freiras, Madeira, Portugal August 17, 2024, in this screen grab obtained from a social media video. netmadeira.com/via REUTERS /File Photo Purchase Licensing Rights

Firefighters have brought under control a large forest fire in the Portuguese island of Madeira that had been burning for 11 days, but authorities said on Sunday they would remain on the ground to stop it flaring up again.

The blaze, which started on Aug. 14, has burnt more than 5,000 hectares (12,000 acres) of vegetation, mostly in mountainous areas where the slopes are steep and the access is often difficult, Reuters reported.

"The fire has now been brought under control, but cannot yet be considered extinguished so the teams will remain vigilant on the ground to prevent possible reignitions," regional civil protection commander Antonio Nunes told news agency Lusa.

Attempts to fight the flames have been hampered by adverse weather conditions, including high temperatures, strong winds and low humidity.

EU authorities provided two Canadair planes to help put out the blaze. The regional government said there had been no injuries, no houses torched and no essential infrastructure destroyed.

The Atlantic island of Madeira is an autonomous region of Portugal with around 250,000 residents and is a popular tourist destination.

Rising global temperatures due to climate change have led to more frequent wildfires, from southern and eastern Europe to North America and parts of Asia.

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The Surprising Reason Why There Are No Human Remains in the Titanic

The RMS Titanic sank at 2:20 am Monday morning on April 15, 1912 after hitting an iceberg in the North Atlantic. (Universal History Archive/Getty Images)
The RMS Titanic sank at 2:20 am Monday morning on April 15, 1912 after hitting an iceberg in the North Atlantic. (Universal History Archive/Getty Images)
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The Surprising Reason Why There Are No Human Remains in the Titanic

The RMS Titanic sank at 2:20 am Monday morning on April 15, 1912 after hitting an iceberg in the North Atlantic. (Universal History Archive/Getty Images)
The RMS Titanic sank at 2:20 am Monday morning on April 15, 1912 after hitting an iceberg in the North Atlantic. (Universal History Archive/Getty Images)

The Titanic, a symbol of hubris and human tragedy, has been a source of fascination for more than 112 years.

But the fact is, the sunken ocean liner was more than just movie fodder or a deep-sea explorer’s holy grail, it was a very real ship on which more than 1,500 people died.

And yet, whilst experts, using the most sophisticated submersible and underwater filming equipment, have found some extraordinary relics from the wreckage, they have never found any skeletons or bones.

“I’ve seen zero human remains,” James Cameron, director of the iconic 1997 film, told the New York Times back in 2012.

“We’ve seen clothing. We’ve seen pairs of shoes, which would strongly suggest there was a body there at one point. But we’ve never seen any human remains.”

Given that Cameron has visited and explored the wreck some 33 times (and claims to have spent more time on the ship than the ship’s captain), if he hasn’t seen any human remains we can assume that there really aren’t any there. So why is this?

It’s a question that has recently been perplexing Reddit users but, luckily, it has some relatively simple answers.

Whilst there was a notoriously insufficient number of lifeboats on the ship, many passengers and crew members still managed to put on life jackets. This means that they remained buoyant even after they succumbed to the freezing cold waters of the Atlantic.

And so, when a storm followed the sinking of the “unsinkable” ship, they were likely swept away from the site of the wreckage and carried further away over subsequent weeks and years by ocean currents.

“The issue you have to deal with is, at depths below about 3,000 feet (around 914 meters), you pass below what's called the calcium carbonate compensation depth,” deep-sea explorer Robert Ballard explained to NPR back in 2009.

“And the water in the deep sea is under saturated in calcium carbonate, which is mostly, you know, what bones are made of. For example, on the Titanic and on the Bismarck, those ships are below the calcium carbonate compensation depth, so once the critters eat their flesh and expose the bones, the bones dissolve,” he said.

Nevertheless, some people believe that there may still be some preserved bodies in sealed off parts of the ship, such as the engine room.

This is because fresh oxygen-rich water that scavengers rely on may not have been able to enter these areas.

Nevertheless, more than a century since the tragedy, it seems likely that such searches for remains would be fruitless.