As the saga surrounding the missing submersible known as the Titan, a vessel carrying five people to document the Titanic shipwreck, came to a tragic end Thursday, many were left wondering: what exactly happened?
Officials revealed Thursday the sub imploded near the site of the shipwreck and killed everyone on board.
Coast Guard officials said during a news conference that they've notified the families of the crew of the Titan, which had been missing since Sunday.
The sliver of hope that remained for finding the crew alive was wiped away early Thursday, when the submersible's 96-hour supply of oxygen was expected to run out and the Coast Guard announced that a debris field had been found roughly 1,600 feet from the Titanic.
The Coast Guard said the submersible likely imploded in the North Atlantic waters.
“The debris is consistent with the catastrophic loss of the pressure chamber,” said Rear Adm. John Mauger, of the First Coast Guard District.
Authorities were hoping underwater sounds detected Tuesday and Wednesday might help narrow their search, whose coverage area had been expanded to thousands of miles — twice the size of Connecticut and in waters 2 1/2 miles deep.
But the Coast Guard indicated Thursday that the sounds were likely generated by something other than the Titan.
“There doesn’t appear to be any connection between the noises and the location (of the debris) on the seafloor,” Mauger said.
Feeling out of the loop? We'll catch you up on the Chicago news you need to know. Sign up for the weekly> Chicago Catch-Up newsletter.
The Coast Guard will continue searching near the Titanic for more clues about what happened to the Titan. Efforts to recover the submersible and the remains of the five men who died will also continue, Mauger said.
OceanGate Expeditions, the company that owned and operated the submersible, said in a statement that all five people in the vessel, including CEO Stockton Rush, “have sadly been lost.”
The others on board were: two members of a prominent Pakistani family, Shahzada Dawood and his son Suleman Dawood; British adventurer Hamish Harding; and Titanic expert Paul-Henri Nargeolet.
“These men were true explorers who shared a distinct spirit of adventure, and a deep passion for exploring and protecting the world’s oceans,” OceanGate said in a statement. “We grieve the loss of life and joy they brought to everyone they knew.”
OceanGate has been chronicling the Titanic’s decay and the underwater ecosystem around it via yearly voyages since 2021.
The Titan launched at 6 a.m. Sunday and was reported overdue Sunday afternoon about 435 miles south of St. John’s, Newfoundland, as it was on its way to where the iconic ocean liner sank more than a century ago.
Rescuers rushed ships, planes and other equipment to the site of the disappearance.
By Thursday, when the oxygen supply was expected to run out, there was little hope of finding the crew alive.
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, that oversees matters involving the Titanic shipwreck. But questions about the submersible's safety were raised by former passengers.
One of the company’s first customers likened a dive he made to the site two years ago to a suicide mission.
“Imagine a metal tube a few meters long with a sheet of metal for a floor. You can’t stand. You can’t kneel. Everyone is sitting close to or on top of each other,” 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 conserve energy, he said, with the only illumination coming from a fluorescent glow stick.
The dive was repeatedly delayed to fix a problem with the battery and the balancing weights. In total, the voyage took 10 1/2 hours.
The submersible had seven backup systems to return to the surface, including sandbags and lead pipes that drop off and an inflatable balloon.
Nicolai Roterman, a deep-sea ecologist and lecturer in marine biology at the University of Portsmouth, England, said the disappearance of the Titan highlights the dangers and unknowns of deep-sea tourism.
“Even the most reliable technology can fail, and therefore accidents will happen. With the growth in deep-sea tourism, we must expect more incidents like this.”
