A submersible carrying five people to view the wreckage of the Titanic on the ocean floor is still missing, despite a massive search operation.
Sounds of banging were heard in the area on Tuesday (19), but the U.S. Coast Guard was unable to identify the source of the sound.
How did they disappear?
The submersible was part of an eight-day tourist journey conducted by OceanGate Expeditions, priced at $250,000 per person. The trip began in Newfoundland, Canada, with participants first traveling 400 miles to the wreck site, which is about 900 miles (1,450 kilometers) off the coast of Cape Cod, Massachusetts.
The submersible began its two-hour descent to the site where the ship’s wreckage is located on the morning of Sunday, June 18. It lost contact with the Polar Prince, the support ship that transported the vessel to the site, 1 hour and 45 minutes after the descent.
Search operations began later that same day.
It is still unclear what happened to the submersible, why it lost contact, and how close it was to the Titanic when it disappeared.
Who is on board?
Although authorities have not released the names of the five missing people, British businessman Hamish Harding, French diver Paul-Henri Nargeolet, Pakistani billionaire Shahzada Dawood, and his son Sulaiman Dawood have been confirmed as passengers. The fifth person is OceanGate CEO and founder Stockton Rush, according to a source familiar with the mission.
Harding is an avid adventurer, having traveled to space aboard Blue Origin last year, and to Challenger Deep in the Pacific Ocean, which is believed to be the deepest point in the world.
The French diver has decades of experience exploring the Titanic. According to his biography, Nargeolet has completed 35 dives to the Titanic wreck and oversaw the recovery of 5,000 artifacts.
The Pakistani father and son are part of a prominent family that runs some of the largest corporations in the country, with a portfolio spanning energy, petrochemicals, fertilizers, IT, and food and agriculture.
How much time do they have?
The submersible was designed to carry 96 hours of oxygen for five people on board. This gives authorities until early Thursday (22) to locate and recover the vessel.
But there are a number of challenges, including the remote location, local weather conditions, the state of the submersible – and the extraordinary depth of the ocean in the area where they disappeared.
What is a submersible? What is it like inside?
A submersible is different from a submarine in several important ways. It has limited energy reserves, so it needs a support vessel on the surface to launch and recover it. It cannot stay underwater for as long; it typically spends 10 to 11 hours during each dive to the Titanic wreck. Submarines can remain submerged for months.
Without GPS underwater, the submersible is guided only by text messages from the surface ship.
Last year, the founder of the tourism operator OceanGate Expeditions showed a CBS team the interior of the submersible. CBS footage shows a small space the size of a minivan. There are no seats, and passengers sit cross-legged on the floor.
For such an advanced submersible, the interior is very simple, with only one button and a screen on the wall. The rest of the vessel’s operations are carried out by a handheld controller that looks like a game console with colored buttons.
There is only a small bathroom at the front of the vessel. In the CBS report, the founder of OceanGate said that when the bathroom is in use, they install a curtain for privacy “and turn up the sound of the music.”
What search operations are underway?
Several agencies from the U.S. and Canada are involved in the search, looking both on the surface and underwater.
Boats, aircraft, and radar equipment are scanning above the water in case the submersible has surfaced. Sonar buoys and sonar equipment on ships are also being used to detect sounds underwater.
But finding the submersible is just the first step; rescuing it could be a completely different challenge.
Depending on where and at what depth the submersible is found, there may be limited options for rescue vessels.
For example, the U.S. Navy’s nuclear-powered submarines typically operate at 800 feet or less – meaning they cannot dive to the ocean floor, where the water pressure on the submarine’s hull could cause it to implode.
In a successful rescue that occurred in 1973, authorities used other submersibles and a remotely operated recovery vessel to connect cables, which were then used to pull the submersible back to the surface. But the detail of that story is that the submersible that went missing in 1973 was at a depth of 1,575 feet. The Titanic wreck is much deeper; nearly 13,000 feet below sea level.
Source: CNN