An international search team spent a 5th day on Thursday scouring the ocean and the skies above the century-old Titanic disaster in search of a tourist submersible Titan that vanished with five people on board and was just hours from the expected end of its air supply.
At 8 a.m. on Sunday morning, OceanGate Expeditions‘ minivan-sized submersible Titan began its descent.
Near the conclusion of what should have been a two-hour dive to the location of the most renowned shipwreck in the world, in a remote area of the North Atlantic, it lost touch with its surface support ship.
According to the corporation, the Titan had 96 hours of air when it launched, thus its oxygen tanks will probably run out somewhere on Thursday morning.
Oxygen Level Depletion in Titan, According To The Experts
According to experts, a number of variables, including whether the submersible still had power and how calm the crew stayed, would determine how long the air would actually last.
Even if the lost vessel was still intact and not stuck or destroyed in punishing depths at or near the sea floor, the countdown to oxygen depletion posed merely a notional limit.
The US Coast Guard reported on Wednesday that Canadian search planes had detected underwater noises using sonar buoys earlier that day and on Tuesday. This gave rescue teams and the loved ones of the Titan’s five occupants hope.
The Coast Guard claimed that attempts to deploy remote-controlled underwater search vehicles to the area where the noises were heard failed, and officials issued a warning that the sounds might not have been from the Titan.
“When you’re in the middle of a search-and-rescue case, you always have hope,” Coast Guard Captain Jamie Frederick said at a press conference on Wednesday. “With respect to the noises specifically, we don’t know what they are.”
The sonar buoy data analysis, according to Frederick, was “inconclusive.”
The French research ship Atalante was on its way late on Wednesday to deploy a robotic diving device capable of plunging to a depth considerably below that of even the Titanic’s ruins, more than 2 miles underwater, the Coast Guard said. This was an eagerly awaited contribution to the hunt.
The US Navy, which was deploying its own unique salvage system built to retrieve massive, heavy undersea objects like sunken aircraft or small vessels, requested the French submersible robot, known as the Victor 6,000.
To read our blog on “Pak Navy stops an attempt by an Indian submarine to enter Pakistani waters,” click here.
