Missing Titanic Submersible Debris Suggests 5 Aboard Submersible Were Lost in ‘Catastrophic Implosion’
Pieces of the missing Titan vessel were found on the ocean floor, about 1,600 feet from the bow of the Titanic, the Coast Guard said. OceanGate Expeditions, the vessel’s operator, said, “Our hearts are with these five souls.”
Debris From Vessel Found During Search and Rescue
The U.S. Coast Guard said parts of the Titan submersible found on the ocean floor indicate a “catastrophic implosion” of the vessel.
This morning, an ROV or remote-operated vehicle from the vessel Horizon Arctic discovered the tailcone of the Titan submersible approximately 1,600 feet from the bow of the Titanic on the seafloor. The ROV subsequently found additional debris. In consultation with experts from within the unified command, the debris is consistent with the catastrophic loss of the pressure chamber. Upon this determination, we immediately notified the families. This is a incredibly unforgiving environment down there on the seafloor, and the debris is consistent with a catastrophic implosion of the vessel. This was a incredibly complex case, and we’re still working to develop the details for the timeline involved with this casualty and the response.
Pinned
The five people aboard the submersible that went missing on Sunday were presumed dead on Thursday, after an international search that gripped much of the world found debris from the vessel near the wreckage of the Titanic. A U.S. Coast Guard official said the debris was “consistent with a catastrophic implosion of the vessel.”
“On behalf of the United States Coast Guard and the entire unified command, I offer my deepest condolences to the families,” the official, Rear Admiral John Mauger, said in a news conference on Thursday.
The U.S. Navy, using data from a secret network of underwater sensors designed to track hostile submarines, detected “an anomaly consistent with an implosion or explosion” in the vicinity of the Titan submersible at the time communications with the vessel were lost on Sunday, two senior Navy officials said on Thursday.
But with no other indications of a catastrophe, one of the officials said, the search was continued.
Both officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss operational details, said that the analysis of undersea acoustic data and information about the location of the noise had been shared with the Coast Guard official in charge of the search.
But without visual or other conclusive evidence of a catastrophic failure, one of the officials said, it would have been “irresponsible” to immediately assume the five passengers were dead, and the search was ordered to continue even though the outlook appeared grim.
The Navy’s acoustic analysis from the secret sensor network was first reported by The Wall Street Journal.
It was not clear how widely the Navy’s acoustical analysis was disseminated among the search team, or why the Navy had not made it public earlier.
Search Vessels Around the Titanic Wreckage
Canadian coast
approximately
373 miles northwest
The Canadian vessel
Horizon Arctic deployed
a remote-operated vehicle
that discovered a debris field
containing remains of the Titan.
The Titanic wreckage
sits on the ocean
floor, approximately
12,500 feet down.
“We’ve never had an accident like this,” James Cameron, the Oscar-winning director of “Titanic,” said on Thursday.
Mr. Cameron, an expert in submersibles, has dived dozens of times to the ship’s deteriorating hulk and once plunged in a tiny craft of his own design to the bottom of the planet’s deepest recess.
A senior U.S. Navy official said that the Navy had, through acoustic analysis, “detected an anomaly consistent with an implosion or explosion in the general vicinity of where the Titan submersible was operating when communications were lost.” The official said that the identification was “not definitive,” the information was immediately shared with the search effort, and that the decision was made to continue searching to “make every effort to save the lives on board.”
Stockton Rush, the chief executive and founder of OceanGate and the pilot of the Titan submersible, was declared dead on Thursday after his vessel was found in pieces at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean, near the rusting wreck of the RMS Titanic. He was 61.
Mr. Rush oversaw finances and engineering for OceanGate, a privately owned tourism and research company based in Everett, Wash., which he founded in 2009. In 2012, he was a founder of the OceanGate Foundation, a nonprofit organization that encouraged technological development to further marine science, history and archaeology.
The Titan submersible that vanished in the North Atlantic on Sunday appeared to have suffered a “catastrophic implosion,” the U.S. Coast Guard said on Thursday, and offered its condolences to the families of the five people who were on board.
Debris from the vessel, which vanished while descending to view the wreck of the R.M.S. Titanic, was found on the ocean floor on Thursday morning, about 1,600 feet from the bow of the shipwreck, Rear Admiral John Mauger of the Coast Guard said at a news conference on Thursday afternoon.
The five people on board included the chief executive of the company that operated the submersible, a Guinness World Record-holding explorer, a man who dived to the Titanic more than 35 times, and a father-and-son duo. Read more about the lives that were lost here.
Hamish Harding, an aviation tycoon and ardent explorer, made it his quest to probe the heavens as well as the depths, landing him a place in Guinness World Records and ultimately leading him to a fateful plunge to the wreckage of the Titanic some two and a half miles below the surface of the North Atlantic.
The submersible craft in which he was traveling with four others lost contact with its mother ship on Sunday. After a five-day multinational search across an area the size of Massachusetts, the company that sponsored the voyage, OceanGate Expeditions, said on Thursday that all five were dead. The U.S. Coast Guard said that debris from the craft was found on the ocean floor on Thursday morning, about 1,600 feet from the bow of the Titanic.
The implosion “would have generated significant broadband sound down there that the sonar buoys would have picked up,” Mauger said. Listening devices in the area, which were dropped Monday, did not hear any signs of such a catastrophic failure, he reported earlier.
Nicholas Bogel-Burroughs
The underwater banging noises that were picked up by the authorities earlier this week do not appear to have had any relation to the site of the submersible’s wreckage. “There doesn’t appear to be any connection between the noises and the location on the sea floor” where the debris was found, Mauger said. Previously, the Coast Guard had said that they repositioned their search efforts around where those noises were detected.
Asked about the prospect of recovering the bodies of the victims, Mauger said he did not have an answer. “This is an incredibly unforgiving environment down there on the sea floor,” he said.
Nicholas Bogel-Burroughs
“I know there’s a lot of questions about how, why, when this happened,” says Admiral Mauger of the U.S. Coast Guard, adding that the authorities have those same questions. “That’s going to be, I’m sure, the focus of future review. Right now, we’re focused on documenting the scene.”
Mauger said it was too early to tell when the vessel imploded. Remote operations will continue on the sea floor, he said.
Nicholas Bogel-Burroughs
Where the Titan submersible was found — 1,600 feet from the bow of the Titanic — and the size of the debris field indicates that the vessel imploded, according to Carl Hartsfield, an expert with the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. There does not appear to be any indication that it collided with the wreckage.
Nicholas Bogel-Burroughs
The authorities found “five major pieces of debris” that indicated they were from the Titan, including a nose cone, the front end of the pressure hull and the back end of the pressure hull, said Paul Hankins, a salvage expert for the U.S. Navy. He said that finding these pieces of debris indicated there was a “catastrophic event.”
Mauger said that officials are still working to come up with a timeline of events.
The debris found today was “consistent with catastrophic loss of the pressure chamber” in the submersible, Mauger said.
Nicholas Bogel-Burroughs
Debris from the Titan submersible, including its tail cone, was found on the ocean floor on Thursday morning, about 1,600 feet from the bow of the Titanic, said Rear Admiral John Mauger of the U.S. Coast Guard.
In a few moments, Rear Adm. John Mauger and Capt. Jamie Frederick of the U.S. Coast Guard will provide updates on findings from the sea floor near the Titanic.
Nicholas Bogel-Burroughs
The announcement by the company that all five passengers on the submersible are believed to be dead appears to cap an international search that stretched across several days and gripped much of the world. Even as the chances of survival looked grim, rescuers had said they were holding out hope that the Titan could be out there somewhere, hopes that appear to have been dashed by the discovery of debris.
“These men were true explorers who shared a distinct spirit of adventure, and a deep passion for exploring and protecting the world’s oceans,” the company said. “Our hearts are with these five souls and every member of their families during this tragic time.”
OceanGate said in a statement that “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.”
It would be a tall order for any agency: finding a submersible vessel that could be more than two miles below the surface of the ocean and hundreds of miles away from land.
But the United States Coast Guard was the best trained and equipped agency for the task, government officials and outside analysts said.
Years before OceanGate’s submersible craft went missing in the Atlantic Ocean with five people onboard, the company faced several warnings as it prepared for its hallmark mission of taking wealthy passengers to tour the Titanic’s wreckage.
In January 2018, the company’s engineering team was about to hand over the craft — named Titan — to a new crew who would be responsible for ensuring the safety of its future passengers. But experts inside and outside the company were beginning to raise concerns.
The United States Coast Guard said on Twitter that a debris field was found in the search area by a remote-operated vehicle. Experts are evaluating the information, the Coast Guard said.
The Coast Guard said it would hold a news conference at 3 p..m. Eastern time in Boston to address findings from a remote-operated vehicle deployed by the Canadian vessel Horizon Arctic on the sea floor near the Titanic.
A remotely operated vehicle that can reach 6,000 meters (about 19,700 feet) below the surface of the ocean was en route to join the search for the missing Titan submersible in the North Atlantic, the Explorers Club, a New York-based organization that counts two of the missing passengers among its members, said on Thursday.
The vehicle, owned by Magellan, a deepwater seabed-mapping company, was being transported from Britain to St. John’s, Newfoundland, where it was expected to land early afternoon local time on Thursday. Two other remotely controlled vehicles are already at the search site around the wreckage of the Titanic. The Titan was on a voyage to visit the shipwreck when it disappeared on Sunday.
Derrick Bryson Taylor
Reporting from LondonThe University of Strathclyde in Glasgow confirmed on Thursday that Suleman Dawood, the 19-year-old man who is on board the missing submersible along with his father, is a business student at the school. He recently completed his first year, a spokesman for the university said.
Derrick Bryson Taylor
Reporting from London“We are deeply concerned about Suleman, his father and the others involved in this incident,” the spokesman said. “Our thoughts are with their families and loved ones and we continue to hope for a positive outcome.”
Derrick Bryson Taylor
Reporting from LondonIn discussing the amount of oxygen left on the Titan, Rear Adm. John Mauger of the U.S. Coast Guard said on Thursday that “people’s will to live really needs to be accounted for, as well.”
Derrick Bryson Taylor
Reporting from LondonThe search for the missing submersible was well underway as of Thursday morning. The Canadian vessel Horizon Arctic has deployed a remotely operated vehicle that has reached the sea floor, the U.S. Coast Guard said on Twitter.
Derrick Bryson Taylor
Reporting from LondonThe French vessel Atalante is also preparing to deploy its remotely operated vehicle.
Stephen Castle
Reporting from LondonA senior British naval submariner, Richard Kantharia, has been assigned to the search-and-rescue mission, Downing Street said. The lieutenant commander was already working with the United States’ Atlantic submarine fleet and was deployed to the search mission on Tuesday night. Britain is also providing a C17 aircraft to transport specialist equipment, the British government said.
Judson Jones
Meteorologist and reporterAfter a day of undesirable weather conditions yesterday, fair weather is expected in the search area on Thursday. Winds may still gust to over 20 miles per hour, but mostly clear skies and wave heights of only about four to six feet are expected.
OceanGate Expeditions, the company behind the Titan submersible missing in a remote part of the North Atlantic since Sunday, conducted tests of its craft in early 2018 outside a marina at its headquarters in Everett, Wash.
It was one of the first saltwater test dives of the vessel, made of carbon fiber and titanium, that was billed as the largest submersible of its type in the world. The company said at the time that the Titan was meant to dive far deeper than its earlier submersibles, and was made out of different material.
The company announced plans to take visitors to the Titanic wreckage in 2017, as its co-founder and chief executive Stockton Rush emphasized the rarefied nature of the experience. “Since her sinking 105 years ago, fewer than 200 people have ever visited the wreck, far fewer than have flown to space or climbed Mount Everest,” he said in a news release at the time. Mr. Rush is on board the missing submersible.
Derrick Bryson Taylor
Reporting from LondonA French research vessel, the Atalante, has arrived in the search area, according to Ifremer, the maritime institute that operates the ship. The Atalante is equipped with a remotely controlled exploration robot, called Victor 6000, that can dive to the depths of the Titanic shipwreck.
A few days ago, when five passengers set off on a deep-sea expedition in the Atlantic Ocean, they traveled aboard a vessel that many experts had already concluded was dangerously designed.
In Thursday’s episode of “The Daily,” William Broad, a science correspondent for The New York Times, explains why he was worried from the start.
Listen to ‘The Daily’: Lost 2 Miles Below the Ocean
The vessel lost en route to the Titanic wreckage had been warned of dangerous circumstances.
Jenny Gross
Reporting from LondonOisin Fanning, who last year dove on the Titan with two of the passengers who are currently on board the missing vessel, said he believed the oxygen supply would last longer than the estimated 96 hours. He is pictured below, at right.
Jenny Gross
Reporting from London“They’ll be monitoring their breathing and keep it as tight as possible,” he said. There is no way to say precisely how much oxygen may be left, but it is estimated to be just a few hours at most.
Derrick Bryson Taylor
Reporting from LondonTwo ships, the Canadian C.G.S. Ann Harvey and the Motor Vessel Horizon Arctic, have arrived at the search site, the U.S. Coast Guard said early Thursday. The Atalante, a French research vessel, was in the vicinity but had not yet reached its destination.
With five passengers on board, the Titan submersible is a tight squeeze: an interior with no seats and a single viewport that is 21 inches in diameter. You can get a better look here at the Titan and the vessels involved in the search.
Nicholas Bogel-Burroughs
Captain Frederick of the U.S. Coast Guard says that a Canadian airplane detected “underwater noises in the search area” on Tuesday, leading the authorities to relocate their efforts in an attempt to find what was making the noises. So far, they have not found the source of those sounds, he says.
Like the other passengers of the missing submersible, Shahzada Dawood loves adventure.
For the British Pakistani businessman, 48, who boarded the vessel with his son, Suleman, 19, the expedition to the wreck of the Titanic followed a yearslong passion for science and discovery, according to friends and family.
The ongoing search and rescue effort for the missing Titan submersible with five people on board, involving a huge response from American, Canadian and French authorities, is vast in scale, including both the U.S. Navy and the Coast Guard.
The expense for such an endeavor is likely to be equally great, and it is unclear whether taxpayers in the countries involved, ultimately, will be required to pay it. The passengers aboard the submersible paid $250,000 each for the experience of diving to the Titanic.
Passengers seeking a glimpse of the R.M.S. Titanic aboard the submersible that disappeared in the North Atlantic this week have endured hours in a dangerous drop to the ocean floor aboard a cramped craft with a single porthole.
Mike Reiss, a producer and writer for “The Simpsons,” boarded the vessel, known as the Titan, last summer. He said that passengers were required to sign a waiver that mentioned death three times on the first page.
Stockton Rush, the chief executive of OceanGate Expeditions and one of the five occupants of the submersible missing this week in the North Atlantic, has advocated for deep-seas tourism in the face of criticism.
His company proceeded with its tours despite the “unanimous concern” expressed by three dozen industry leaders in 2018. In an interview last year, he told The New York Times that high-resolution footage gathered on the Titanic tours could benefit researchers.
Hamish Harding, a British explorer aboard the submersible missing in the North Atlantic, acknowledged in a 2021 interview that he had taken on deep-sea missions in the past knowing that rescue would not be an option.
“If something goes wrong, you are not coming back,” he told the Indian newsmagazine The Week after he made a record-setting trip to Challenger Deep, the furthest depths of the Mariana Trench. At almost seven miles, the Mariana Trench is far deeper than the Titanic site that the submersible was set to visit, which is about two-and-a half miles down."
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