The submarine that was taking a group of tourists to see the remains of the Titanic would have already been left without an oxygen supplyas the rescue teams had warned. The ship disappeared last Sunday with five people on board. That is why these are the limit hours of the rescue.
It is a highly complicated mission. Rescuers are searching an area the size of Belgium. The Titan submarine, from the OceanGate company, could be at the bottom of the ocean or floating on the surface.
In the first case, if the submersible is at the bottom of the ocean, it would be almost impossible to rescue. It is that it is very deep: the wreck of the Titanic it is 3,800 meters deep below the surface. The submersible lost contact approximately halfway through its descent. “It’s pitch black down there. It’s freezing cold. The seabed is muddy and rippled. You can’t see your hand in front of your face,”” Tim Maltin, an expert on the sinking and wreckage of the Titanic, told Reuters.
One possibility would be a submarine-to-submarine rescue, but there are very few such vessels that could reach this level of depth. And if they could reach it, the submersibles have no power to tow the missing ship.
On top of all this, the operation is complicated by the fact that the ocean floor is almost unknown territory. “We know more about the lunar surface than we do about the ocean floor., simply because we haven’t studied it,” explained Jamie Pringle, a forensic geoscientist at Keele University in Britain.
In total there are 10 vessels, supported by C-130 aircraft of the United States Army, which are being used to comb an area of 20,000 square kilometers. Is approximately, the size of Belgium or El Salvador. In addition to a depth of almost four kilometers in total and absolute darkness.
What if the Titanic submarine is on the surface?
If the submarine is floating on the surface, the operation would be no less simple. Rescuers are searching for a craft the size of a van in an area that corresponds to the size of Belgium. In addition, it is so far out in the ocean that it complicates the movement of rescue boats and teams to the area.
The United States Coast Guard reported this afternoon that one of the robots used to search for the Titan, you have found a wreckage area in the search area. These are being analyzed by experts gathered at an operations coordination center in Boston. A statement is expected in the next few hours.
Diving expert David Mearns, and a friend of two of the passengers on board, informed the BBC that the debris found included “a landing gear and the rear deck of the submersible.” Guillermo Söhnlein, co-founder of OceanGate, told the British media that there is the possibility that there has been an “instantaneous implosion” of the boat.
The Titan’s crew is made up of a Pakistani executive, his 19-year-old son, a British billionaire, a French explorer and the CEO of OceanGate, the company that operates the submarine and Titanic expeditions.