The worst forecasts were confirmed. The United States Coast Guard reported on Thursday the discovery of the remains of the Titan submarine, which last Sunday began an expedition to the wreck of the Titanic. According to the official statement, the five crew members died. Until now, the main hypothesis of the accident points to an eventual implosion of the ship.
Rear Admiral John Mauger of the Coast Guard explained to the press that the conditions of the wreckage were “consistent with a catastrophic loss of the pressure chamber”. Rescuers reported that within the debris were the submersible’s nose cone and the front of its hull.
The investigation is just beginning and the precise causes are likely to take time to be known. However, some experts have already explained that a possible failure in the hull of the submarine could have caused the implosion. “The conclusion that there was a hull rupture is certainly unanimously supported by the finding of the fragments,” Jules Jaffe, a research oceanographer at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, told Wired.
Such a failure would be fatal due to the extraordinary pressure that exists in the depths of the ocean. Nicolai Roterman, a deep-sea ecologist and professor of marine biology at the University of Portsmouth, told Forbes that the Titan was subjected to over 5,500 pounds per square inch (PSI) of pressure.
The pressure faced by the lost submarine of the Titanic
To put into perspective what it means to be exposed to 5,500 PSI, the pressure we experience from the atmosphere to sea level is only 14.7 PSI. It is much less than 1% of what the lost submarine on the Titanic expedition eventually experienced.
If a plane, for example, registers a hull failure, the pilot could still land the craft safely. But 12,000 feet below the surface, the pressure is so strong that a rupture wouldn’t just let water in.
“If there was some kind of hull breach, the occupants succumbed to the ocean in an instant,” Roterman explained. The co-founder of OceanGate, Guillermo Söhnlein, who left the company years ago, thinks the same. “If there was a failure, it would result in an instant implosion. If that’s what happened, it would have happened four days ago.” said Söhnlein to the BBC.
He New York Times reported that OceanGate had received a warning for its experimental approach and the potential catastrophic consequences that would result. The Marine Technology Society sent in 2018 a letter warning that the Titan’s design did not follow industry safety standards. He also noted that OceanGate had not confirmed its security program with a third party. It is not yet known if the company responded to the organization’s concerns then.