The US Coast Guard says a missing submersible exploded near the wreckage of the Titanic, killing all five people on board.
Coast Guard officials said during a news conference Thursday that they have notified the families of the crew of the Titan, which has been missing for several days. Debris found during the search for the ship “is consistent with a catastrophic ship implosion,” said Rear Adm. John Mauger of the Coast Guard’s First District.
“The support in this very complex search operation has been greatly appreciated. Our deepest condolences to the friends and loved ones of the crew,” Mauger said.
OceanGate Expeditions said in a statement that all five people on board, including the company’s CEO, Stockton Rush, are believed to be dead. Rush, Shahzada Dawood and her son Suleman Dawood, Hamish Harding and Paul-Henri Nargeolet are “sadly lost,” OceanGate said in a statement.
OceanGate did not provide details when the company announced the “loss of life” in a statement or how officials knew the crew members died. The Titan’s 96-hour oxygen supply likely ran out early Thursday.
OceanGate has been chronicling the decline of the Titanic and the underwater ecosystem around it through annual voyages since 2021.
The Titan was estimated to have a four-day supply of breathing air when it launched on Sunday morning in the North Atlantic, but experts have stressed that was an imprecise approximation to begin with and could be extended if passengers had taken measures to conserve breathable air. . And it is not known if they survived from the year the disappearance of the subordinate.
first responders they have rushed ships, planes and other equipment at the place of disappearance. On Thursday, the US Coast Guard said an underwater robot sent by a Canadian ship had reached the seabed, while a French research institute said a diving robot with cameras, lights and arms had also gone join the operation.
The authorities have waited underwater sounds could help narrow their search, whose coverage area has expanded to thousands of miles, twice the size of Connecticut and in waters 2 1/2 miles (4 kilometers) deep. Coast Guard officials said underwater noises were detected in the search area on Tuesday and Wednesday.
Jamie Pringle, an expert in forensic geosciences at Keele University in England, said that even if the noises came from the submersible: “Lack of oxygen is key now – even if they find it, they still have to get to the surface and get rid of them. that.”
Titan was reported to have passed Sunday afternoon about 435 miles (700 kilometers) south of St. John’s, Newfoundland, on its way to where the iconic ocean liner sank more than a century ago. OceanGate Expeditions, which is leading the voyage, has been chronicling the decline of the Titanic and the underwater ecosystem around it through annual voyages since 2021.
By Thursday morning, hopes were fading that anyone aboard the ship would be found alive.
Dr Rob Larter, a marine geophysicist at the British Antarctic Survey, highlighted the difficulty of finding something the size of the submersible, which is about 22 feet (6.5 meters) long and 9 feet (almost 3 meters) high .
“You’re talking about totally dark environments,” where you can miss an object a few dozen meters away, he said. “It’s just a needle in a haystack situation unless you have a pretty precise location.”
Newly discovered allegations suggest there had been significant vessel safety warnings during the development of the submersible.
Broadcasters from all over the world news started at critical time on Thursday with news of the submersible. The Saudi-owned Al Arabiya satellite channel showed an on-air clock counting down to its estimate of when the air might end.
Capt. Jamie Frederick of the Coast Guard’s First District said a day earlier that authorities still hoped to save the five passengers on board.
“This is a search and rescue mission, 100 percent,” he said Wednesday.
Retired Navy Capt. Carl Hartsfield, now director of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Systems Laboratory, said the detected sounds have been described as “thumping noises,” but warned that research teams “must put the whole image in context and have to eliminate possible artificial sources other than Titan.” Frederick acknowledged Wednesday that authorities did not know what the sounds were.
The sound report was encouraging to some experts because submarine crews who cannot communicate with the surface are taught to hit their sub’s hull to be detected by sonar.
The US Navy said in a statement on Wednesday that it was sending a specialized salvage system capable of lifting “large, bulky and heavy underwater objects such as aircraft or small ships”.
The Titan weighs 20,000 pounds (9,000 kilograms). The US Navy’s Flyaway Deep Ocean Salvage System is designed to lift up to 60,000 pounds (27,200 kilograms), the Navy said on its website.
Pilot Stockton Rush, CEO of OceanGate, has been lost on board the ship. Its passengers are: the British adventurer Hamish Harding; Pakistani businessman Shahzada Dawood and his son Suleman; and French explorer and Titanic expert Paul-Henry Nargeolet.
In Pakistan’s first comments since the Titan went missing, Pakistan’s foreign ministry spokeswoman Mumtaz Zahra Baloch said Thursday that officials are confident in the search efforts.
“We would not like to speculate about the circumstances of this incident and would also like to respect the wishes of the Dawood family that their privacy be respected,” he said.
At least 46 people successfully traveled on OceanGate’s submersible to the Titanic wreck site in 2021 and 2022, according to letters the company filed with a U.S. District Court in Norfolk, Virginia, which oversees the matters related to the wreck of the Titanic.
One of the company’s first customers characterized a dive he made at the site two years ago as a “kamikaze operation”.
“Imagine a metal tube a few meters long with a sheet of metal on the floor. You can’t stand it. You can’t kneel. Everyone is sitting near or on top,” said Arthur Loibl, a retired businessman and adventurer from Germany. “You can’t be claustrophobic.”
During the 2 1/2-hour descent and ascent, the lights were turned off to save energy, he said, with the only illumination coming from a fluorescent light pole.
The dive was repeatedly delayed to fix a problem with the battery and balance weights. In total, the trip took 10 and a half hours.
The submersible had seven safety systems for returning to the surface, including sandbags and falling lead tubes and an inflatable balloon.
Nick Rotker, who heads underwater research at the nonprofit research and development company MITER, said the difficulty in searching for Titan has underscored the U.S.’s need for more underwater robots and remotely operated underwater vehicles. .
“The problem is that we don’t have a lot of capability or systems that can go to the depth that this ship went to,” Rotker said.
Nicolai Roterman, a deep-sea ecologist and professor of marine biology at the University of Portsmouth, England, said the Titan’s disappearance highlights the dangers and unknowns of deep-sea tourism.
“Even the most reliable technology can fail and therefore accidents will happen. With the growth of high-altitude tourism, we have to expect more incidents like this.”
___
Associated Press writers Jon Gambrell in Dubai, United Arab Emirates; Ben Finley in Norfolk, Virginia; Frank Jordans in Berlin; Danica Kirka in London; and John Leicester in Paris contributed to this report.
