London – Much has been said about how to find the Titan, the tourist submersible that disappeared Sunday while carrying five people to the remains of the Titanic, and how difficult it will be to locate the little ship in the vast North Atlantic. But even if the monumental effort by US and Canadian authorities to find the diver succeeds, this is only the first challenge.
Rescuing the five people from the diver would be another challenge.
With no sightings on the surface, the only lead rescuers had to follow by Wednesday afternoon was the sound of described as banging noises detected by surveillance planes. This left open the possibility of a scenario where the submersible could still be found floating on or near the surface, allowing rescuers to open it – it can only be opened from the outside – and rescue the crew.
But if it is on the seabed near the The remains of the Titanicit will be a much more challenging proposition.
“I think if it’s at the bottom of the sea, there are so few submarines that are capable of going that deep, and so I think it would be almost impossible to affect an underwater rescue,” Titanic expert Tim Matlin. he told the Reuters news agency.
OceanGate Expeditions/Handout via Reuters
Two possible rescue options
Ralf Bachmayer, a professor of marine environmental technology and deepwater engineering at the University of Bremen in Germany, told CBS News on Wednesday that there were two main possibilities for rescue if the submarine is on the seabed. It could be lifted, which he said would be “very difficult” at the depth of the area, which is about 13,000 feet, or nearly two and a half miles.
Matlin questioned the feasibility of such an operation, telling Reuters that rescuers “can’t have a line that hooks it all the way because it would be too heavy and too much of a drag,” given the length of the wiring that would be required.
The other possibility could be a flotation device, which Bachmayer called a lift bag, that could be slid under the sub to help lift it to the surface.
But the Titan could be engulfed in debris in the Titanic’s wide wreckage field, and that kind of rescue attempt would require remotely operated vehicles to have enough access to slide that device under the 21-foot-long submersible.
The use of ROVs, or remotely operated vehicles, would be vital to any rescue option, if deemed viable.
In the first scenario, an ROV or multiple ROVs could be used to attach a cable to bring Titan to the surface. They could also be used to dislodge him from anything he’s stuck on.
Blair Thornton, professor of marine autonomy at the University of Southampton in England, said modern ROVs “typically have high-definition cameras, lights and will be physically attached by a tether to a ship, with very experienced pilots operating them “.
A deep-sea rescue operation in the area around the Titanic wreck, he said, would likely involve attaching a cable to the stricken ship with an ROV and then slowly bringing it to the surface.
But Thornton said this particular scenario would be a highly unusual task for the ROVs available, and would likely require them to adapt to the challenges of operating so deep.
ROV operators, he said, are used to “thinking on their feet, assessing the situation and trying to dislodge or move objects that were never designed to be picked up by an ROV.”
Bachmayer agreed that the missing Titan had presented rescuers with an unprecedented situation.
“We had the situation with the Kursk,” Bachmayer said, referring to the Russian nuclear-powered submarine that sank in the Barents Sea in 2000. “They tried to get people out. But that’s not possible in this case, because it is much too deep, and the rescue submarine used then, is not suitable for these depths”.
None of the 118 crew members of the Kursk survived this disaster.
The two experts who spoke to CBS News said the use of ROVs at these depths has been done before, in order to retrieve instruments from the seabed, for example, but that retrieving a manned submersible would present new challenges, and even if and when Titan is found, there will still be many questions to be answered.
For example, “Is the vehicle shell still intact?” Thornton asked. “What is keeping it in the background? The answer will depend on those situations.”
If the main housing, the diver’s body that keeps the water and oxygen inside, is still intact, he said the diver would be essentially weightless at sea and, as long as it’s not entangled, should be Phone. On land, it would weigh several tons.
Thornton was quick to stress that finding Titan was the essential first step, and said it was undeniable that time was running out quickly, given the limited supply of oxygen it was reduced to.
The U.S. Coast Guard said Tuesday that the submersible was believed to have enough air last the crew about 41 hours, and rescue officials said they were still holding out hope. But experts on the deep sea and on the Titanic did not show much optimism.
“The wreck of the Titanic is two and a half kilometers down. It’s pitch black down there. It’s freezing cold. The seabed is muddy and choppy. You can’t see your hand in front of your face. The only way to find where you are. It’s because of something called sounding. The radar doesn’t even work,” Matlin, author of three books on the Titanic disaster, told Reuters. “It’s really a bit like a moonshot… So I fear for the lives of those scouts on board.”
