The Submersible Titanic's Demise

The events leading up to the Titan submarine, which was taking five passengers to the Titanic's century-old wreck, are shown in the following chronology:

The U.S. Coast Guard described the Titanic submersible's demise as a catastrophic implosion, which killed all five of the passengers on board. However, the search that led to this discovery and the race against time to find the survivors turned into a five-day international rescue operation that attracted attention worldwide, in part because of the connection to the Titanic, the unstoppable British ship that met its tragic end in 1912.

Here is how it all played out and what we now know about what occurred. This search operation is highly complex, and we are running out of time and chances to find them alive. Ocean Gate shouldn't have been doing what it is on Saturday, June 17th, Ocean Gate's Titan sub mobile prepares for its voyage to the century-old Titanic wreck that day British billionaire and explorer Hamish Harding posts online saying a weather window has just opened up and we're going to attempt a dive tomorrow. We didn’t post online again at 8am on Sunday, when the Titans submersible starts its descent, setting off the 96-hour timer.

The ship should have taken two hours to descend to the Titanic wreck, which is located in the North Atlantic Ocean at a depth of 12,500 feet, from the moment it was sealed, but it took one hour and 45 minutes. When the submersible loses contact with the surface vessel at this apparently crucial time—when it was supposed to return to the surface at 3 p.m. but doesn't—the Coast Guard is alerted at 5:40 p.m. on Monday.

Search crews emphasize that this is an isolated area and that it is challenging to conduct a search despite the fact that American and Canadian ships and planes are swarming the area and some are dropping sonar boys that can monitor to a depth of 13,000 feet. On Tuesday, authorities also requested assistance from commercial vessels after a Canadian plane fitted with equipment to track submarines discovered noises that were thought to be banging noises over the course of several hours.

Officials later claim that further investigation of the sound is inconclusive at this time, but the noises initially give hope that the Titan is still intact and that its inhabitants are alive and trying to communicate by hammering on the hull. According to a friend of Hamish Harding, recovery of the pair alive at 2 a.m. on Wednesday would be a miracle as things stand right now.

The United States Coast Guard reports that it has sent remote-controlled vehicle searches to the area where the sounds were heard. Reaching the search area is a French research ship with a deep sea diving vessel. The 96-hour oxygen window ends on Thursday at 6 am Eastern time, ending any remaining prospects of discovering the passengers alive by 2 PM.

The surface search area is now roughly twice the size of Connecticut, and the subsurface search is up to 2.5 miles deep. The Titan submersible's pieces have been discovered in a field of debris on the seafloor, about 1600 feet from the Titanic's bow. The U.S. Coast Guard has confirmed that the debris is consistent with the loss of the pressure chamber and an implosion, and that there were no survivors. When did the sub meet its end during the search operation? All the way back on Sunday around 9:45 AM when contact with the sub was lost, it was reported that acoustic data detected by the The U.S. Navy had an anomaly consistent with an implosion or explosion.

Sonar buoys in the water didn't detect any loud or violent noise that would have been generated by an implosion, suggesting it happened before the search began. James Cameron, who directed the Academy Award-winning film Titanic and has personally seen the disaster, claimed to have learnt of the acoustic findings the following day and understood what they indicated.

After four days of searching, which included sprinting around with their hair on fire, the sub was found to be exactly where it had been thought to be—on the sea bottom below its last reported location, we received confirmation within an hour that there had been a loud bang at the same time that the Subways that the Titanic submersible was lost, so by Monday morning when we first learned about the incident, we had the following information. Within an hour and a half, we also had the information that they were on dissent, were at 3,500 feet, and had lost communications and tracking. We've lost some friends, the submarine has imploded, we truly hoped and prayed we were wrong, but we knew we weren't aliens, so we wrote emails to everyone we knew.

Information pertaining to the submersible Titanic was obtained and reproduced courtesy of the Reuters News Agency

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