Mystery of the Titan Submersible: The Depths and Race Against Time
Three days ago, a privately owned submersible carrying five persons on a deep-sea dive to the Titanic wreck has been missing in the Atlantic Ocean. A Canadian seaplane has now picked up on banging noises that have been reported at intervals of 30 minutes, which has authorities searching for their origins.
The emergency oxygen supply on board the ship may last for 40 hours, according to an estimate by the US Coast Guard on Tuesday afternoon. The missing crew members include Paul-Henri Nargeolet, a French submersible pilot, Shahzada Dawood, a Pakistani-British businessman, and their son Suleman. Also missing is Stockton Rush, the CEO, and creator of OceanGate Expeditions.
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What is the Titan Submersible?
According to its website, OceanGate, a private firm that offers submersibles for commercial, scientific, and military uses, is the owner and operator of the Titan, a five-person research and survey submersible.
It can accommodate up to five passengers, generally a pilot and four crew members. The craft is 22 feet (6.7 meters) long, weighs 23,000 pounds (10,400 kilograms), and is designed to dive to depths of 13,123 feet (4,000 meters) and move at a speed of 3 knots (3.5 mph, or 5.6 km/h).
The design of the Titan, a custom-built ship, has not been kept a secret. The submersible is bolted from the outside and is made of titanium and carbon fiber that has been filament woven. This implies that the crew within is unable to open it; instead, a team on the surface must unseal the hatch to let them out.
During its diving operations, OceanGate also makes use of Elon Musk’s Starlink satellite technology. Propellers, flotation tanks that can be inundated with water or filled with air, and weights that can be dropped to produce positive buoyancy are just a few of Titan’s ways of descending and returning to the surface.
An array of lights, a laser and sonar scanner, as well as externally attached cameras, allow the crew to look beyond the ship and into the deep-sea darkness. The Titan’s viewport, a pressure-proof glass with an interior diameter of 12.3 inches (31.2 cm), is also available for use by passengers. According to OceanGate, it is the largest viewport of any deep-diving crewed submersible.
What Could Have Happened?
It is still too early to speculate about Titan’s possible fate, even though a variety of plausible explanations have been put out by specialists. These can be a submersible becoming tangled up on a piece of the Titanic’s wreckage, a hull rupture, bad weather, or a power outage.
Support vessels lost communication with the specially constructed submersible about 1 hour and 45 minutes into its 2.5-hour journey to the Titanic’s ruin, which is situated about 900 miles (1,500 kilometers) east of Cape Cod and 12,500 feet (3,800 m) below the surface. The electronic systems of the submersible could not have operated if there had been a fire on board, possibly caused by an electrical short circuit.
How Difficult Will It Be To Find?
There appear to be two planes, a submarine, and sonar buoys looking for the Titan right now. The United States Coast Guard claimed to have flown over a region roughly “the size of Connecticut” in search of indications that it has surfaced. The submersible would have contained a transponder and a transceiver for signal transmission and reception, it is stated.
However, attempting a rescue might be difficult. Eight times less than the maximum depth Titan could be found at, the deepest ocean rescue in history—the 1973 retrieval of the Canadian submersible Pisces III off the coast of Ireland—took occurred at 1,575 feet (480 m) below the surface.
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There aren’t many boats that could salvage the vessel if it is discovered quite near the Titanic’s depths. The submersible is most likely well beyond the range of NATO’s Submarine Rescue System (NSRS), which has a maximum depth range of 2,037 feet (621 meters) for its remotely operated vehicles.
What Next?
The discovery that noises have been heard during the search for a lost submersible has raised the possibility that the five crew members are still alive. In a large rescue effort to locate the Titan in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, sonar buoys used in the operation captured the sounds. According to the US Coast Guard, underwater operations have been moved to look into the noises, but they haven’t turned up with anything yet.
And the following several hours are crucial since it’s anticipated that oxygen supplies will run out on Thursday at around 10:00 GMT.
