The U.S. Coast Guard announced on Thursday that a deep-sea Titanic submersible that was lost after a “catastrophic implosion” that killed everyone on board was located in pieces. The search for the submersible had taken place internationally for five days.
U.S. Coast Guard Rear Admiral John Mauger told reporters that on Thursday morning, a robotic diving vehicle sent out from a Canadian ship discovered a debris field from the submersible Titan on the seabed about 1,600 feet (488 metres) from the bow of the Titanic, 2 1/2 miles (4 km) beneath the surface, in a remote area of the North Atlantic.
The Titan, a titanic submersible owned and run by the American company OceanGate Expeditions, went missing on Sunday morning about an hour and a half into a dive that was supposed to take two hours to reach the world’s most famous shipwreck.
The 22-foot (6.7-meter) Titan’s tail cone and two pieces of its pressure hull were among five significant pieces discovered in the Titan’s wreckage, according to Coast Guard officials. There was no indication of whether or not any human remains were found.
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No Survivors from the Titanic Submersible:
There were no survivors among the five men aboard the Titanic Submersible, including Stockton Rush, the company’s founder and CEO, who was operating the Titan, according to a statement from OceanGate that was released before to the Coast Guard’s press conference.
The other three were British nationals Shahzada Dawood, 48, and his 19-year-old son Suleman; British billionaire and explorer Hamish Harding; and French oceanographer and famous Titanic expert Paul-Henri Nargeolet, 77, who had visited the wreck numerous times. Teams of searchers and support staff from the United States, Canada, France, and Great Britain had spent days using planes and ships to scour thousands of square miles of open water for any sign of the Titan.
The aftermath of a considerably worse maritime calamity that resulted from the wreck of a migrant vessel off the coast of Greece last week, which killed hundreds of people, was virtually ignored by the intense global media coverage of the hunt. It is unclear whether collecting the victims’ remains will be possible given the nature of the disaster and the harsh conditions at those depths, but Mauger said robotic equipment on the seabed will continue to gather data.
On Thursday, when the submersible’s estimated 96-hour air supply was supposed to run out assuming the Titan were still intact, the hunt had grown more desperate. However, the countdown proved pointless. Near Cape Cod, Massachusetts, and 400 miles (640 km) south of St. John’s, Newfoundland, the RMS Titanic, which encountered an iceberg and sank during her maiden voyage in 1912, killing more than 1,500 people on board, is located.
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