An OceanGate submersible disappeared more than 600 kilometers south of Saint John on the island of Newfoundland (Canada) on Sunday.
Around four in the morning, the descent to the remains of the Titanic Transatlantic began at a depth of 3,960 meters, where it sank in April 1912. About an hour and 45 minutes later, all contact with the ship was lost.
The Titan submersible from the company OceanGate carried four people in addition to the pilot. The cost of participating in the expedition in this titanium-reinforced carbon fiber ship is $250,000 per passenger. This material (Carbotan or Carbotitanium) is used to make airplanes and high-performance cars.
The oxygen stored in the tanks is enough to breathe for 96 hours, giving occupants a margin until Thursday morning at normal breathing rates. In stressful situations, this increases and thus the oxygen consumption accelerates.
Search the remains of the “Titanic”
OceanGate Expeditions was founded in 2009 with the idea of expanding exploration of the deepest ocean, a very underexplored part of the earth’s surface. The company offers tourist excursions to the sites of famous shipwrecks or to visit the seabed. He has also participated in expeditions for scientific and commercial purposes: according to his website, he has conducted 14 expeditions and more than 200 dives in the Pacific and Atlantic.
Titan is one of the three submersibles it owns and it is the one that can penetrate the deepest. After two failed attempts, he managed to travel to the Titanic six times in 2021 and seven times the following year. That’s where he took pictures like this one.
Finding his position to summon a rescue isn’t easy. The submersible has no direct communication with the outside world, but has a sonar (Teledyne BlueView 2D) for navigation, which it could use to try to locate rescue equipment. It has connections to Starlink satellites, Elon Musk’s company that provides internet through space, but it doesn’t work on the seabed.
To facilitate submersion, the Titan is equipped with ballast that can be released for resurfacing. Therefore, air and sea resources were deployed in the area to locate the submersible should it reach the sea surface. To reach the seabed, work is being done on the use of a small unmanned submarine with a capacity of 4,000 meters, which will maintain communication with the operator on the surface so that the latter can control it and collect the data collected by the machine. .
The seabed in the area where Titan sank is characterized by an abyss where Titanic got stuck after its sinking and an environment full of ocean liner remains, making underwater incursions dangerous and making it difficult to recover them using Locate sonar submersible. . This device identifies objects based on the echo of the sound waves it emits. The more Titanic remains, the more difficult it is to distinguish a single element.
The “map” of the seabed where the “Titanic” was destroyed was created using sonar in 2012 and consists of more than 100,000 photos. (AP)AP
you can follow THEME on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, or sign up here to receive our weekly newsletter.
Subscribe to continue reading
Read without limits