People have been left confused about why the Titanic didn’t implode when it sank, following the news that the lost Titan sub likely suffered that fate.
The heartbreaking news that the 5 people on board the vessel are believed to have been “sadly lost” broke last week. It came after debris was found that was “consistent with catastrophic loss of the pressure chamber.”
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The sub, named Titan, was carrying 5 people down to the bottom of the ocean to see the Titanic’s shipwreck in real life, which is located 3,800m below sea level, and is 370 miles off the coast of Newfoundland. The trip is thought to have cost £195,000 per head.
It vanished on the morning of June 18 after losing contact with its mothership MV Polar Prince roughly 1 hour and 45 minutes into the vessel’s 2-hour descent.
On board the sub was Stockton Rush, the CEO of OceanGate Expeditions, the company who own the vessel and conduct the tourist trips. Alongside him was the British billionaire Hamish Harding, British-based Pakistani millionaire Shahzada Dawood and his 19-year-old son Suleman. The fifth person on board was Paul-Henry Nargeolet, a French submersible pilot who was considered one of the world’s leading experts on the Titanic.
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Since the underwater vessel lost contact, the search effort hugely ramped up after authorities estimated that they were quickly running out of oxygen.
An update gave authorities more hope, as an aircraft detected “underwater noises in the search area.”
“As a result, ROV (remotely operated vehicle) operations were relocated in an attempt to explore the origin of the noises. Those ROV searches have yielded negative results but continue,” the Coast Guard tweeted.
It was additionally reported that a second aircraft with underwater detection abilities detected “banging sounds.”
However, in the wake of the heartbreaking discovery of the debris, the Coast Guard confirmed that these sounds were likely just ‘background ocean noise’.
Rear Admiral John Mauger explained to Sky News: “We’ve taken that information and shared it with top leading experts from the US Navy and the Canadian Navy, and they’re working on the analysis of that information, they’re continuing to work on the analysis of that information.
“The initial reports is that there’s a lot of the sounds that were generated were from background ocean noise, but they continue to … look for all available information there.
“What’s important to me, and what’s important as the unified command, is that we’ve continued search in the areas where noise was detected with the ROVs that we have from the time of that detection, so we’re not waiting for this analysis to take action.
He added: “The analysis is really helpful to our overall search-and-rescue efforts, but we’re not waiting on it, we’ve moved the remote operated vehicles that we’ve had on site to those areas where noise was detected.”
Following the heartbreaking news that the sub has likely suffered a catastrophic implosion, a video depicting what this may have looked like has appeared on TikTok.
In a clip shared by user @sincerelybootz, viewers can see a vessel being flattened out and then ripped apart.
“It’s very instantaneous as far as death when it comes to any lives that may be on board,” the narrator says.
A different clip shared by @starfieldstudio shows the OceanGate Titan careering to the floor of the ocean when it crumples as a tin can would when stepped on, before the metal explodes after the vessel imploded, leaving none of the sub intact.
“The hull would immediately heat the air in the sub to around the surface of the sun’s temperature, as a wall of metal and seawater smashed one end of the boat to the other, all in around 30 milliseconds,” the text over the video reads.
“I have a really dumb question,” Jesse Kelly wrote on Twitter. “If the water pressure is so bad … how is the Titanic sitting on the bottom and relatively intact?”
Twitter, as always, provided the answer, with Sean Davies responding: “The wreckage isn’t pressurised, so there’s no pressure differential.”
In simpler terms, this means that the sub imploded as a result of the pressure inside and outside being different.
Professor Arun Bansil explained, via IFL Science: “When a submersible is deep in the ocean it experiences the force on its surface due to water pressure. When this force becomes larger than the force hull can withstand, the vessel implodes violently.
“If the pressure on the inside of an object is lower than that of the outside then an implosion can occur if the thing containing the pressure can no longer withstand the force.”
However, it turns out that certain parts of the Titanic did suffer this fate after all, such as the stern which imploded at around sixty feet below the surface.
Other parts survived, though, thanks to air escaping from inside the boat, meaning that the pressure inside and outside the vessel was equal, so that an implosion could not occur.
Madonna shared an ominous social media post before she was rushed to the ICU after being found unresponsive at a New York City residence.
The news comes just weeks before the star was set to embark on her eighty-four date ‘Celebration’ world tour, to honour the fortieth anniversary of her career.