(CNN) –– The words “Titanic moment” are possibly the last thing you want to hear on a ship, but that was the phrase used by a passenger aboard the Carnival Spirit cruise ship last week after the ship unexpectedly struck an iceberg.
No one was injured on board and the ship was not damaged following the incident, which a Carnival Cruise Line spokesperson described as the ship colliding with “a piece of drifting ice.”
Carnival Spirit was sailing in Alaska’s Tracy Arm Fjord, a waterway south of the city of Juneau known for its spectacular beauty and floating chunks of ice.
Videos of the incident circulated on social media, as several passengers filmed the moment the ship collided with the iceberg.
Cassandra Goskie posted a video on TikTok in which a voice is heard saying: “If we died, it was worth it, it’s a Titanic moment,” just before the ship crashed into the patch of ice.
Meanwhile, passenger Saurabh Singhal said in a Facebook post that the ship stopped “for hours to assess the damage.”
“An assessment determined there was no damage to the hull of the ship and the vessel continued its journey and there was no impact on operations,” a Carnival spokesperson told CNN Travel.
The Carnival Spirit ended its seven-day Alaska cruise without interruption on Tuesday and returned to Seattle, Washington. Since then, the ship embarked on another round trip to Alaska, this time lasting 14 days.
In 2022, Norwegian Cruise Line’s ship Norwegian Sun hit a piece of iceberg while sailing in Alaska and suffered damage to the starboard bow. There were no injuries.
Alaska is a popular cruise destination, but apparently in the In recent years there was resistance by residents concerned about excessive congestion of waterways in the region.
Alaska’s waters are also known for being some of the most challenging to navigate for cruise ships.
“That ice is hard and can damage the hull or propellers,” Capt. John Herring, a marine pilot from Southeast Alaska who boards ships in the region to help ensure safe passage, told CNN Travel in 2022. “Strong winds and currents make navigation in icy waters even more difficult.”
Despite these difficult conditions, “we very rarely – if ever – see problems related to sailing in icy waters,” said cruise expert Chris Gray Faust, executive editor of Cruise Critic, an online cruise review and community site.
“Today’s cruise ships are built specifically to navigate different waters,” Gray Faust told CNN Travel. “Not only can those sailing in Alaska handle icy waters, but they have experienced captains who are familiar with the landscape, so the reported incident did not cause any problems to the boat or navigation.”
