According to CNN, the Titanic-bound submersible that went missing on Sunday with five people on board suffered a “catastrophic implosion,” killing everyone on board, US Coast Guard Rear Adm. John Mauger said Thursday. A remotely operated vehicle found the tail cone of the Titan about 1,600 feet away from the bow of the shipwreck, he said.
Hamish Harding, Paul-Henri Nargeolet, Shahzada Dawood and his son Suleman Dawood, and Stockton Rush, the CEO of the tour organizer, OceanGate Expeditions, died in the craft. The submersible was descending to explore the wreckage of the luxury liner, located 900 miles east of Cape Cod and about 13,000 feet below sea level.” Stockton Rush manned the Titan’s first “validation dive” to 4,000 meters in 2018, according to the company. The company then began offering tourists the opportunity to dive to the depths of the Titanic in the following years, selling tickets for the 2023 journey for $250,000.
How did they communicate?
Radio waves either bounce off the ocean or are absorbed by it, leaving submersibles with limited methods of communication, according to Jim Bellingham, a professor at Johns Hopkins and a pioneer in underwater robotics. (ABC News, 2023). Submersibles like the Titan instead use underwater sounds to transmit data packets across the ocean, experts said. The receiving party aboard a support ship can then use a hydrophone to receive the data transmitted acoustically, which can then be converted into understandable information like text or audio, according to experts.
“The medium of that information traveling is sound, and there are issues relating to that because different layers of the ocean can effectively reflect sound,” University of Portsmouth professor and deep-sea ecologist Nicolai Roterman told ABC News. The Polar Prince, the Titan’s support vessel, lost contact with the submersible on Sunday morning, according to the Coast Guard. The company notified the Coast Guard about the overdue vessel several hours later, at 5:40 p.m.
The Titan differs from other submersibles by using a hinged hatch that support staff would bolt shut externally, based on demonstrations of the submersible given to various media outlets.”The challenge for these people is that even if their submersible [is] bobbing around at the surface, which it may well be, they’re unable to get out of the hatch,” Roterman said.
What have we learned?
All five people aboard the submersible, known as the “Titan,” were killed, the US Coast Guard said in a Thursday news conference. The tail cone and other debris from the missing submersible were found by a remotely operated vehicle about 1,600 feet from the bow of the Titanic, which rests about 13,000 feet deep in the North Atlantic Ocean. “The debris is consistent with a catastrophic implosion of the vessel,” US Coast Guard Rear Adm. John Mauger, the First Coast Guard District commander, told reporters. A senior Navy official told CNN the Navy detected an acoustic signature consistent with an implosion on Sunday in the general area where the vessel was diving and lost communication with its mother ship. (CNN, 2023)
May they Rest In Peace…
