The deep-sea submersible carrying five people on a voyage to the Titanic shipwreck on the floor of the Atlantic was found in pieces from a “catastrophic implosion” that killed everyone aboard, the U.S. Coast Guard said on Thursday.
A robotic diving vehicle deployed from a Canadian ship discovered a debris field from the submersible Titan on Thursday morning on the seabed some 1,600 feet from the bow of the Titanic, in a remote corner of the North Atlantic, a Reuters report cited U.S. Coast Guard Rear Admiral John Mauger as saying.
The Titan, operated by the U.S.-based company OceanGate Expeditions, had been missing since it lost contact with its surface support ship on Sunday morning about an hour, 45 minutes into what should have been a two-hour dive to the world’s most famous shipwreck.
Five major fragments of the Titan were located in the debris field left from its disintegration, including the vessel’s tail cone and two sections of the pressure hull, Coast Guard officials said. No mention was made of whether human remains were sighted.
“The debris field here is consistent with a catastrophic implosion of the vehicle,” Mauger said.
OceanGate, the company that owned the 22-foot submersible, issued a statement saying there were no survivors among the five men aboard the Titan, including the company’s founder and chief executive officer, Stockton Rush, who was piloting the Titan.
Also on board the Titan were Hamish Harding, 58, of the UK, founder of investment firm Action Group and an avid adventurer; French maritime expert Paul-Henry Nargeolet, 77, Shahzada Dawood, 48, and Suleman Dawood, 19, a father and son of one of Pakistan’s most prominent families.
The Titan, a 22-foot craft made of carbon fibre and titanium, was designed to carry a pilot and four crew to a maximum depth of 13,120 feet.
No messages were received after a mothership on the surface lost all communications with the Titan on June 18, about 2 hours after it began diving toward the Titanic shipwreck.
Tickets cost $250,000 for an eight-day trip including dives to the wreck at a depth of 12,500 ft. Each full dive to the wreck, including the descent and ascent, reportedly took around eight hours.
The Titanic, which was the largest ship of its time, sank after it hit an iceberg on its very first voyage trans-Atlantic voyage from Southampton to New York in 1912. Of the 2,200 passengers and crew onboard, more than 1,500 died.
