The US Coast Guard has confirmed the deaths of the Titanic Five and now the world’s attention is turned to the possible recovery of the Titanic submersible wreckage and victims.
The 21-foot-long Titan lost contact with its mothership on Sunday as it sank about 12,500 feet toward the seabed — where parts of the ship were found by a remote-controlled rescue submarine near the liner’s wreckage on Thursday.
However, the likely pounds per square inch or PSI exerted by the water pressure at these depths make recovery very unlikely.
The search for a missing submersible near the wreck of the Titanic has ended – the five people on board are now also believed to be missing
The 21-foot-long Titan lost contact with its mothership on Sunday as it sank about 12,500 feet toward the seabed — where parts of the ship were found by a remote-controlled rescue submarine on Thursday
How big is the pressure at the PSI site?
While some animals can survive at extreme depths thanks to adaptations, humans can only go about 400 feet without the help of modern technology
Following Thursday’s discovery, a hull fracture is believed to have caused the small five-person boat to implode on itself while the occupants were still on board.
Expressed in atmospheres — a unit of measure used to quantify pressure by comparing it to sea level pressure (1 atmosphere) — the water pressure at the site of the Titanic wreck is about 400 atmospheres, or 400 times the pressure most people are used to.
In pounds per square inch (PSI), another more well-known unit of pressure, the pressure at these depths is about 6,000 PSI. For reference, sea level pressure is about 14.7 psi.
dr Nicolai Roterman, a deep-sea ecologist at the University of Portsmouth, said that if such an accident had happened, the pressure would have killed the occupants instantly – a theory that has been corroborated multiple times by scientists familiar with such issues.
“If there were any hull breach, given the pressure of more than 5,500 pounds per square inch exerted by the ocean at a depth of 3,800 m (12,467 feet), the occupants would succumb to the sea almost instantly,” Roterman said.
Florida-based lead researcher Steve Somlyody came to an almost identical assessment Thursday, telling Fox News the passengers “didn’t even know it happened.”
“The pressure down there at 4,000 meters is pretty high. “About 5,800 PSI at Titanic depth,” he said. “If they had any leak, it would lead to an implosion, and that would be instantaneous, very instantaneous.”
Greg Stone, a California-based oceanographer who has been on similar submersibles, added, “When there’s a pressure failure, it happens very quickly and is over in a second.”
Where is the wreck of the Titanic?
The wreck of the Titanic (12,500 feet) is well below the water pressure that humans can survive. Experts say that if the hull is damaged, the probability of survival is almost zero
Long lost in an area of the Atlantic Ocean near Newfoundland dubbed “Iceberg Alley,” much of Titanic’s hull was found in 1985 on the seabed near where she sank more than 70 years earlier was.
The barnacle-covered boat was found about 400 miles off the Canadian coast and more than two miles below the sea’s surface — where pressure conditions become problematic.
However, nearly 40 years after its discovery, only a handful of people have actually seen the lost ship, which set sail from Southampton for New York City in April 1912 before sinking.
What’s more, the wreck is left in place as salvage is difficult at such depths – where pressures are more than 10 times what even the most experienced deep-sea divers could withstand.
Will they ever be able to recover the bodies?
Shahzada Dawood and his 19-year-old son Suleman were aboard the ill-fated Titan alongside British billionaire Hamish Harding. All three are presumed dead after the ship imploded almost 12,500 feet below the waterline
French explorer PH Nargeolet and OceanGate CEO Stockton Rush are among those trapped on the submersible
With the five souls’ fates most likely sealed, search officers now face the looming task of locating and possibly recovering the remains. That might be a foolish undertaking, however – given that the intense pressure at such a depth would make a salvage a slow and tedious process and most likely there would not be much left to retrieve
With the fate of the five souls sealed, search officers now face the looming task of locating and possibly recovering the remains.
That might be a silly undertaking, however – given that the intense pressure at such a depth would make a salvage a slow and tedious process, and most likely there would not be much left to bring back to the surface.
To make matters worse, Titanic’s debris is spread over a kilometer and underwater currents could cause the remaining crew members to move from their underwater resting place.
Lawrence Brennan, a professor at Fordham University’s School of Law, described the situation to PBS as one of the worst-case scenarios.
To even attempt it, Brennan said, rescuers would need equipment that was “currently unavailable” and extremely expensive — which even then left little chance of finding anything of note other than more debris.
“Equipment for deep-sea oil drilling might work, but that equipment is probably not near the search site,” he said.