The U.S. Coast Guard said Thursday that a submersible found a “garbage field” near the Titanic in search of a missing submersible with five people on board, a potential breakthrough in an increasingly urgent, round-the-clock effort.
The Coast Guard’s Twitter post gave no details, such as whether officials believe the wreckage is related to Titan, which was on an expedition to inspect the wreckage of the Titanic. The search passed the critical 96-hour mark on Thursday when it could have run out of air to breathe.
The Titan was estimated to have had roughly four days of air to breathe when it lifted off on Sunday morning in the North Atlantic, but experts stressed that this was a vague approximation to start with and could be increased if passengers took conservation measures to fit. breathing air. And it is not known whether they survived after the disappearance of the submarine.
Rescuers threw ships, planes and other equipment to the place of disappearance. On Thursday, the US Coast Guard said an underwater robot sent by a Canadian ship had reached the seabed, and a French research institute said a deep-sea robot with cameras, lights and arms had joined the operation.
Authorities are hoping the underwater sounds can help narrow their search, whose coverage area has been expanded to thousands of miles — twice that 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.
Jamie Pringle, a forensic science expert at Keele University in England, said that even if the noise were coming from a submersible, “lack of oxygen is now a key factor; even if they find it, they still need to get to the surface and unscrew it.”
The Titan was reported to be overdue Sunday afternoon about 435 miles (700 km) south of St. John’s, Newfoundland, as it was heading to where the iconic ocean liner sank over a century ago. Leading the trip, OceanGate Expeditions has been chronicling the collapse of the Titanic and the underwater ecosystem around it through annual voyages from 2021.
By Thursday morning, hope that anyone on board the ship would be found alive had dried up.
Many hurdles still remain, from pinpointing the ship’s location to reaching it with rescue equipment and bringing it to the surface – assuming it’s still intact. And all this must happen before the passengers run out of oxygen.
Dr Rob Larter, a marine geophysicist with the British Antarctic Survey, highlighted the difficulty of finding anything even the size of a submarine, which is about 22 feet (6.5 meters) long and 9 feet (nearly 3 meters) high.
“You’re talking about completely dark environments” in which you can’t see an object several tens of feet away, he said. “It’s just a needle in a haystack if you don’t have a good enough location.”
Newly uncovered allegations suggest that important safety warnings were made during the development of the submersible.
Broadcasters around the world began their news releases at a critical hour Thursday with news about the submersible. The Saudi-owned satellite channel Al Arabiya aired a live clock ticking down their estimate of when the broadcast could potentially end.
Captain Jamie Frederick of the First Coast Guard District said a day earlier that authorities were still hoping to rescue the five passengers on board.
“This is a search and rescue mission, 100%,” he said on Wednesday.
Frederick said that while the detected sounds provide an opportunity to narrow down the search, their exact location and source have not yet been determined.
“Honestly, we don’t know what it is,” he said.
Retired Navy Capt. Carl Hartsfield, now director of Woods Hole Oceanographic Systems Laboratory, said the sounds were described as “knocking”, but he warned search crews “need to piece together the whole picture in context, and they must eliminate potential man-made sources.” except for Titan.
The report has encouraged some experts because submarine crews who cannot communicate with the surface are taught to tap the hull of a submarine to be detected by sonar.
The US Navy said in a statement on Wednesday that it is sending a specialized rescue system capable of lifting “large, bulky, and heavy underwater objects such as aircraft or small craft.”
The Titan weighs 20,000 pounds (9,000 kg). The US Navy’s Flyaway sea depth rescue system is designed to lift 60,000 pounds (27,200 kg), according to the US Navy website.
Pilot Stockton Rush, CEO of OceanGate, has gone missing on board. Its passengers include British adventurer Hamish Harding, Pakistani businessman Shahzada Dawood and his son Suleman, and French explorer and Titanic expert Paul-Henry Nargole.
In his first comment from Pakistan since the disappearance of the Titan, Pakistani Foreign Ministry spokesman Mumtaz Zahra said on Thursday that officials have confidence in the search effort.
“We would not like to speculate on the circumstances of this incident, and we would also like to respect the desire of the Dawood family to respect their privacy,” she said.
At least 46 people have successfully traveled on the OceanGate submersible to the Titanic wreck in 2021 and 2022, according to letters the company has filed with the US District Court in Norfolk, Virginia, which oversees cases related to the Titanic shipwreck.
One of the company’s early clients described his dive to the facility two years ago as a “kamikaze operation.”
“Imagine a metal pipe a few meters long with a metal sheet as the floor. You can’t take it. You cannot kneel. Everyone sits next to each other or on top of each other,” said Arthur Loibl, a former businessman and adventurer from Germany. “You can’t be claustrophobic.”
During the 2.5-hour descent and ascent, the lights were turned off to conserve energy, and the only illumination came from a fluorescent glow stick, he said.
The dive was repeatedly postponed to resolve problems with the battery and balance weights. The total travel time was 10.5 hours.
The submersible had seven back-up systems to return to the surface, including sandbags and lead pipes, as well as an inflatable balloon.
Nicholas Roterman, a deep sea ecologist and lecturer in marine biology at the University of Portsmouth, England, said the disappearance of Titan highlights the dangers and uncertainty of deep sea tourism.
“I think it’s important to remember that for us humans, the depths of the sea are a very inhospitable place,” he said.
“Even the most reliable technology can break down, and that’s why accidents happen. With the rise of deep sea tourism, we should expect more incidents like this.”
