The pilot and four passengers aboard OceanGate’s Titan submersible were presumed dead Thursday after a remote operated vehicle discovered pieces of the vessel over two miles deep on the sea floor.
US Coast Guard officials said a debris field discovered about 1,600 feet from the Titanic’s bow was “consistent with the catastrophic loss of the pressure chamber.”
In a statement, OceanGate said, “We now believe that our CEO Stockton Rush, Shahzada Dawood and his son Suleman Dawood, Hamish Harding, and Paul-Henri Nargeolet, have sadly been lost.”
“This is an incredibly complex operating environment on the sea floor over two miles beneath the surface,” Coast Guard officials said. “The ROV has been searching, and we’ve been able to classify parts of the pressure chamber for the Titan submersible.”
“Essentially, we found five major pieces of debris that told us that it was the remains of the Titan,” said Paul Hankins, director of the U.S. Navy’s salvage operations and ocean engineering for the U.S. Navy.
“The initial thing we found was the nose cone, which was outside of the pressure hull. We then found a large debris field,” he added. “Within that large debris field, we found the front-end bell of the pressure hull. That was the first indication that there was a catastrophic event.”
Hankins said crews also found a second, smaller debris field, and the aft end of the pressure hull “which was basically comprised the totality of that pressure vessel.”
“If you’re descending too fast, that can cause excess stress on certain parts of the vehicle,” Retired U.S. Navy Submariner Mark Martin told WFLA’s J.B. Biunno. “The reason you descend in a controlled manner is so that everything in the vehicle has the ability to acclimate to the increased pressure.”
“There’s a lot of energy in the ocean and you’re trying to hold this little bubble of air for people inside of it,” said Christopher Roman, Professor of Oceanography with URI’s Graduate School of Oceanography.
“The ocean is desperate to get inside of that. If it fails catastrophically, it’s a lot of energy that’s going to be released.
Dr. Roman added the incident “would be a very high-energy event.”
OceanGate has been chronicling the Titanic’s decay and the underwater ecosystem around it via yearly voyages since 2021.
The Titan was estimated to have about a four-day supply of breathable air when it launched Sunday morning in the North Atlantic — but experts have emphasized that was an imprecise approximation to begin with and could be extended if passengers have taken measures to conserve breathable air. And it’s not known if they survived since the sub’s disappearance.
Rescuers have rushed ships, planes and other equipment to the site of the disappearance. On Thursday, the U.S. Coast Guard said an undersea robot sent by a Canadian ship had reached the sea floor, while a French research institute said a deep-diving robot with cameras, lights and arms also joined the operation.
Authorities had been hoping underwater sounds might help narrow their search, whose coverage area has been 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 Tuesday and Wednesday.