The US Coast Guard reported this morning that a Canadian plane involved in the search for the missing Titan submersible, with five people on board, detected “underwater noise”. The apparatus began descending on Sunday for a trip to the remains of the Titanic Transatlantic, which was sunk in 1912 at a depth of 3,800 meters more than 600 kilometers from Newfoundland but lost track shortly thereafter. Time is ticking against the rescue efforts as it is estimated that the bathyscaphe’s air supply will be exhausted by Thursday.
The detected sounds have prompted search teams, which include several countries, to move their operations underwater “to investigate the origin of the sounds,” the Coast Guard said in a series of tweets first released on Wednesday became.
Canadian P-3 aircraft detected underwater noise in the search area. As a result, ROV missions were shifted to investigate the origin of the noise. These ROV searches have yielded negative results but will continue. 1/2
— USCG Northeast (@USCGNortheast) June 21, 2023
The Coast Guard has given no further details on the nature or range of the noises, or how they were recorded, although several US media outlets have disclosed that the noises were picked up by Canadian aircraft at 30-minute intervals.
Operated by the American company OceanGate Expeditions, the Titan was built to remain underwater for 96 hours. On Sunday, he began the descent with five passengers but lost contact with the surface after two hours of submersion. On board were British billionaire explorer Hamish Harding, 58, President of Action Aviation; veteran French explorer Paul Henry Nargeolet, 73, who has led half a dozen expeditions to Titanic; Shazada Dawood, a Pakistani administrator of a California-based non-profit organization and British citizen, and his son Suleman; and Stockton Rush, the head of OceanGate. The cost of the tourist expedition is about $250,000 per person.
US and Canadian planes and a ship equipped with a deep-sea submersible continue to search the area of the disappearance, more than 7,600 square miles of open sea. More ships are expected to arrive in the coming hours, including the French government-supplied Atalante ship, also equipped with an underwater robot capable of deep exploration.
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