The Titanic Implosion: Presumed Human Remnants and More Titanic Debris Have Been Recovered Coast Guard Say

PORTLAND, Maine — Human remains have likely been recovered from the wreckage of the submersible that imploded during an underwater voyage to view the Titanic, the U.S. Coast Guard said Wednesday.

Shortly after the announcement that debris from the Titan, which was found more than 12,000 feet under the surface of the North Atlantic, had arrived in St. John’s, Newfoundland, the news came. Twisted chunks of the submersible were unloaded at a Canadian Coast Guard pier.

There’s still more work to be done to understand the factors that led to the catastrophic loss of theTitan and make sure it doesn’t happen again. Jason Neubauer said in a statement released late Wednesday afternoon.

The “presumed human remains” will be brought to the United States, where medical professionals will conduct a formal analysis, Neubauer said. He added that the Coast Guard has convened an investigation of the implosion at the highest level. The Marine Board of Investigation will analyze and test evidence, including pieces of debris, at a port in the U.S. There will be a future public hearing where the board will share the evidence.

Authorities have not disclosed details of the debris recovery, which could have followed several approaches, according to Carl Hartsfield, who directs a lab at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution that designs and operates autonomous underwater vehicles and has been serving as a consultant to the Coast Guard.

If there are small pieces, you can put them together in a basket or a collection device. A ROV could be used to retrieve larger pieces on the ocean floor, like the one brought to the crash site by the Canadian ship. He said that large pieces could be pulled up with a tow line.

Representatives for Horizon Arctic did not respond to requests for comment. The ROV is owned by Pelagic Research Services, a company with offices in Massachusetts and New York, and they are not allowed to comment on the investigation.

Source: https://www.npr.org/2023/06/29/1184970204/presumed-human-remains-and-more-titan-debris-have-been-recovered-coast-guard-say

Implosion of the Titanic Experiment in a Submersible. The Titan’s Journey to St. Johns, Newfoundland, 2023

There could be important clues about what happened to the Titan if the debris is analyzed and the electronic data is recorded.

The ship’s voyage data recorder was sent to a lab for analysis by the Board of Canada, which is investigating into the mother ship.

Stockton Rush, the Titan’s pilot and CEO of OceanGate Expeditions, the company that owned the submersible, was killed in the implosion along with two members of a prominent Pakistani family, Shahzada Dawood and his son Suleman Dawood; British adventurer Hamish Harding; and Titanic expert Paul-Henri Nargeolet.

It took two and a half hours for Titan and its crew to get to the bottom. Having clambered into the submersible’s cramped confines, the pilot and four passengers sat awkwardly against the inside of the hull, engineers bolting the craft closed from the outside. From now until the end of their dive, they would be encapsulated, separated from the world by water and air.

They had departed from the Canadian port city of St. John’s, Newfoundland, at 8 am eastern daylight time on June 18, 2023. Now, roughly 375 nautical miles to the east, they were poised to begin their mission: to dive to the Titanic. Riding in the sub were Stockton Rush, president and founder of OceanGate, the exploration company that operated the craft; British billionaire Hamish Harding; French deep-sea explorer Paul-Henri Nargeolet; and British-Pakistani businessman Shahzada Dawood and his son Suleman.

Already, time was against them. When doing dives way out into the ocean, a OceanGate was, “you’re roughly a half-week to a week out from help,” says Peter Girguis, an oceanographer at Harvard University. It took the crew nearly eight hours to alert the US Coast Guard that they had gone missing. The US and Canadian authorities had to locate a sub in an area double the size of Connecticut, which was two and a half mile deep, in order to have enough oxygen to last until the press conference.

communications with Titan were lost one hour and 45 minutes later. If their vessel was still intact, regardless of where they were, the crew would run out oxygen in approximately 94 hours. An international search-and-rescue operation was set to begin.

The rescue mission was underway by the morning of June 19. The US Coast Guard had started conducting a search 900 miles east of Cape Cod, in collaboration with the Canadian armed forces and commercial vessels in the area. “It is a remote area and a challenge, but we are deploying all available assets to make sure we can locate the craft,” Coast Guard rear admiral John W. Mauger said in a press conference.

Titan had no emergency radio beacon, no recovery system and no beacon in its lifetime on the Sahara-Industrio-Sahara sub-Marine

There were further complications. Titan lacked an emergency radio beacon or a dedicated recovery system. “There wasn’t any way for its surface vessel to send anything down, help locate the sub, or pull them up,” says Girguis. And without a beacon, Titan could be floating on the surface unnoticed.