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An emergency search and rescue operation is underway in the Atlantic Ocean after a tourist submarine went missing during a dive into a Titanic wreck on Sunday 18th June 2023.
The search commenced after contact with the small submarine was lost about an hour and 45 minutes into its dive, this is according to the us Coast Guard. The submarine had five people on board who had boarded the submarine for tickets worth $250,000 for an eight-day trip including dives to the wreck at a depth of 3,800m (12,500ft).
How’s the inside of the Titanic Submarine?
The submarine which is part of on OceanGate Expedition tour, had five passengers aboard. The passengers who have been identified are OceanGate Expeditions CEO Stockton Rush, British billionaire Hamish Harding, French diver Paul Henry Nargeolet, prominent Pakistani businessman Shahzada Dawood and his son, Suleman.
The Titan’s dimensions are 22 feet by 9.2 feet by 8.3 feet, according to a diagram of the vessel used in promotional documents. Only one of the passengers is able to fully extend their legs in the diagram, which describes the arrangement as the “typical seating configuration.”
There’s no traditional toilet aboard the vessel, which is steered with a video game controller, as previous passengers have detailed.
“It’s basically a car that you drunkenly drove into the ocean,” Mike Reiss, a writer, and producer who has worked on “The Simpsons” and who took the trip last year, said on his podcast.
Getting into the vessel itself was the “most dangerous part,” Reiss said. The New York-based writer said he had to scramble up a 6-foot “kitchen ladder” that was leaned against the submersible as the ladder bobbed in the waves.
Rescue and search operations in the Atlantic.
The US Coast Guard said “a small submarine with five persons onboard” had gone missing in the vicinity of the Titanic wreck and that the vessel had the capacity to be submerged for 96 hours, but it was unclear whether it was still underwater or had surfaced and was unable to communicate.
The submersible was reported overdue on Monday but contact was lost 1 hour 45 minutes into its dive on Sunday afternoon, the coast guard said.
A British explorer and a French military veteran and submarine expert were believed to be among those onboard the Titan, a deep diving submersible operated by underwater tourism company Oceangate.
Rear Admiral John Mauger, first district commander of the US coast guard, overseeing the search-and-rescue operation, told a press conference late on Monday afternoon that “we are doing everything we can do” to find the sub and its occupants.
US and Canadian ships and planes swarmed the area about 1,450km east of Cape Cod, some dropping sonar buoys that can monitor to a depth of almost 4,000m, the US Coast Guard said, but the search was “complex” because crews did not know if the vessel had surfaced, meaning they must scour both the surface and the ocean depths of nearly 13,000 feet.
Read: Who were the 5 people killed on board the OceanGate Titanic submersible
David Concannon, an adviser to OceanGate, said the submersible’s 96-hour oxygen supply started at roughly 6 am Sunday. In an email to the Associated Press, Concannon said officials were working to get a remotely operated vehicle that could reach a depth of 6,000m to the site as soon as possible.
“We’re making the best use of every moment of that time. What we’re focused on is finding those five people,” Mauger said.
OceanGate Expeditions, the company that offers visits to the wreck, which lies on the ocean floor at a depth of almost 4,000m and about 370 miles off the coast of Newfoundland, has been running expeditions since 2021.
A statement on the company’s website on Monday read: “Our entire focus is on the crew members in the submersible and their families. We are deeply thankful for the extensive assistance we have received from several government agencies and deep sea companies in our efforts to re-establish contact with the submersible.”
Also Read: Bizarre story of Victor Noir – Man behind the Sexiest Tomb in France.
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The current situation with the passengers and the amount of oxygen left in the Titanic submarine.
After underwater noises were detected for the second day in a row, the rescue operations for the missing submarine that was taking five passengers to the underwater Titanic wreck have been expanded to double the search area. Though the US Coast Guard said that authorities are still holding out hope of saving those onboard, estimates point to the oxygen in Titan running out as early as Thursday morning local time.
A US Coast Guard official said that while the sounds that have been detected offered a chance to narrow the search, their exact location and source haven’t yet been determined. Camera-equipped remote-operated robots are playing a key role in search operations.
Sean Leet, who heads a company that jointly owns the submersible support ship, the Polar Prince, told reporters yesterday that “all protocols were followed” but declined to give a detailed account of how communication ceased.
“There’s still life support available on the submersible, and we’ll continue to hold out hope until the very end,” Leet, CEO of Miawpukek Horizon Maritime Services, told reporters.
The Titan submarine set off with 96 hours of air, according to the company, meaning its oxygen tanks would likely be depleted sometime on Thursday morning. How long the air would actually last, experts said, depended on various factors, such as whether the submersible still had power and how calm those aboard remained.
Still, the countdown to oxygen depletion posed only a hypothetical deadline, assuming the missing vessel was even still intact, rather than trapped or damaged in punishing depths at or near the sea floor.
