Rescuers face an immense and technically demanding task in their search for a missing submarine en route to the Titanic wreckage. The chances of success are slim; however, teams worldwide are racing against time to locate the sub and its crew before their oxygen supply runs out.
Rescue workers searching for a missing tourist submersible near the wreck of the Titanic have detected “underwater noises” in the search area, the US Coast Guard said Wednesday, with the five on board estimated to have less than 24 hours of oxygen left.
They are trying to find the orca-sized submersible that vanished on its way to visit the wreck of the Titanic are facing a gargantuan task that will test the limits of technical know-how, with only a very slight chance of success, experts say.
Teams around the world were racing against the clock Tuesday to locate the vessel and its five-person crew before their oxygen ran out, with little more than a day’s supply left.
But scouring a 7,600-square-mile (20,000-square-kilometer) area of the North Atlantic to a depth of more than two miles (almost four kilometers) takes work.
“It’s pitch black down there. It’s freezing cold. The seabed is mud, and it’s undulating. You can’t see your hand in front of your face,” Titanic expert Tim Maltin told NBC News Now.
“It’s a bit like being an astronaut going into space.”
The 21-foot (6.5-meter) submersible, Titan, carried three fee-paying passengers when it vanished Sunday: British billionaire Hamish Harding, Pakistani tycoon Shahzada Dawood, and Dawood’s son Suleman.
OceanGate Expeditions, which runs the Titan’s trips, charges $250,000 for a seat.
The company’s CEO Stockton Rush and French submarine operator Paul-Henri Nargeolet, nicknamed “Mr. Titanic” for his frequent dives at the site, are also aboard.
US Coast Guard Captain Jamie Frederick told reporters Tuesday that his organization was coordinating the search.
But, he said, it was complicated and far beyond what the coast guard would typically tackle.
Frederick explained that rescuers were using several methods as they combed the vast area for the Titan, which lost contact with its mothership just two hours into its dive near the Titanic’s watery grave.
Mechanical or electrical failure
The effort was being augmented Tuesday by a substantial pipe-laying vessel with a remotely operated vehicle, expected to be deployed at Titan’s last known position.
Jules Jaffe, who was part of the team that found the Titanic in 1985, said there were two likely explanations for the sub’s disappearance.
“It’s either a mechanical failure or an electrical failure,” he said.
“I’m hoping it’s an electrical failure because they do have weights; one of the safety procedures that they have is to make themselves lighter. So if you’re heavier than the water, you sink; if you’re lighter than the water, you float.”
Jaffe, a research oceanographer at the University of San Diego, said rescuers would be looking on the surface, in the water column, and on the seafloor.
“The worst place for them to would be on the seafloor, which would imply that the vehicle itself either imploded or got tangled somehow.”
Adding to the challenge: the enormous pressure four kilometers underwater, around 400 times what it is on the surface.
Such pressures strain equipment significantly, and very few vessels can survive these depths.
According to the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, nuclear submarines generally operate at just 300 meters.
Jamie Pringle, a professor of forensic geosciences at Keele University in Britain, said if the mini-sub had settled on the ocean floor, it could be challenging to spot.
“The bottom of the ocean is not flat; there are lots of hills and canyons,” Pringle said, according to NBC.
Further complicating the seafloor prognosis is the debris field from the Titanic itself, the very thing the adventurers had gone to see.
“I mean, it’s a mangled wreck, with probably all kinds of treacherous things which would not be very friendly for a small boat,” said Jaffe.
“The opportunities for finding them in a mangled wreck within the next 36 hours, I think, are practically impossible.”
Miroslava Salazar with AFP
