After days of searching for the submersible that disappeared in the Atlantic Ocean while carrying five people to view the wreckage of the Titanic, officials said its fate is no longer a mystery: It imploded in the depths of the sea, apparently just hours after it began its descent.
Coast Guard Rear Adm. John Mauger said at a news conference Thursday that teams had found pieces of the missing submarine “consistent with a catastrophic implosion of the ship” in a debris field on the sea floor, just 16,000 feet from the Titanic’s bow.
A US Navy official said the military detected “an acoustic anomaly consistent with an implosion” on Sunday shortly after the submarine, named Titan, lost contact with the surface, the National Security Correspondent reported from CBS News, David Martin.
But search and rescue teams did not want to lose hope and used the information to narrow the search area.
What happens during an underwater implosion?
Implosions occur when objects are under significant pressure. Will Kohnen, chairman of the Society for Marine Technology’s Submarine Committee professional group, told Reuters that when it comes to an underwater implosion, “within a split second, it’s gone.” He believes the implosion probably happened “fairly early” on the diver’s company.
“It implodes inward in a matter of a thousandth of a second,” he said. “And it’s probably a mercy, because it was probably a kinder ending than the incredibly difficult situation of being in a cold, dark, confined space for four days. So, that would have happened very quickly. I don’t think anyone would have or just time to realize what happened.”
For Kohnen, one puzzling aspect of the situation was how communication and follow-up were lost so soon.
“It’s all acoustic, but you’ve got a system for voice, you’ve got a system for a text… range finder… sound, and it’s based so you have a backup, so it doesn’t all go down at once. all of a sudden” , he said. “…It was funny that all systems went down at the same time.”
An implosion, he said, “indicates that it would have happened on the way down, early in the dive.”
How deep was the Titanic when it exploded?
Mauger said Thursday that it is still too early to know when exactly the ship imploded. But what officials do know is that it lost contact with its mother ship an hour and 45 minutes after passing under the Atlantic.
And how much pressure submersible with carbon fiber hull was under when it imploded would depend on how deep it was at the time. When at sea level, there is 14.7 pounds of pressure pressing on the human body per square inch, according to NOAA. But that pressure changes dramatically as you go lower and lower underwater, often noticeable among divers who feel the pressure in their masks and ears.
“The deeper you go under the sea, the greater the pressure of the water pressing down on you,” says NOAA. “For every 33 feet (10.06 meters) you go down, the pressure increases by one atmosphere.”
The wreckage of the Titanic lies at about 12,500 feet, which means that the pressure at that depth would be about 400 times the pressure that would be felt at sea level, far beyond what the human body could withstand for even a moment. American Scientific Reports that at these depths, “each square inch of an object’s surface experiences the equivalent of 5,500 pounds of force.”
Jen Christiansen, modified from “How the Ocean Sustains Complex Life,” by Mark Fischetti, Kelly J. Benoit-Bird, Skye Morét, and Jen Christiansen, in Scientific American; August 2022
five people they were aboard the lost submarine: British businessman Hamish Harding; British Pakistani businessman Shahzada Dawood and his teenage son, French explorer Sulemanl Paul-Henri Nargeolet; i Stockton Rushthe CEO of OceanGate, the company that offered the Titanic wreck tour.
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