JUNE 28, 2023, UPDATE:
PORTLAND, Maine (AP) — Human remains have likely been recovered from the wreckage of the submersible that imploded during an underwater voyage to view the Titanic, the U.S. Coast Guard said Wednesday (June 28, 2023).
The news came hours after the announcement that debris from the Titan, collected from the seafloor more than 12,000 feet (3,658 meters) below the surface of the North Atlantic, had arrived in St. John’s, Newfoundland. Twisted chunks of the submersible were unloaded at a Canadian Coast Guard pier.
Recovering and scrutinizing the wreckage is a key part of the investigation into why the Titan imploded last week, killing all five people on board. The multiday search and eventual recovery of debris from the 22-foot (6.7-meter) vessel captured the world’s attention.
“There is still a substantial amount of work to be done to understand the factors that led to the catastrophic loss of the Titan and help ensure a similar tragedy does not occur again,” Coast Guard Chief Capt. Jason Neubauer said in a statement released late Wednesday afternoon.
The “presumed human remains” will be brought to the United States, where medical professionals will conduct a formal analysis, Neubauer said. He added that the Coast Guard has convened an investigation of the implosion at the highest level. The Marine Board of Investigation will analyze and test evidence, including pieces of debris, at a port in the U.S. The board will share the evidence at a future public hearing whose date has not been determined, the Coast Guard said.
Neubauer said the evidence will provide “critical insights” into the cause of the implosion.
Debris from the Titan, which is believed to have imploded on June 18 as it made its descent, was located about 12,500 feet (3,810 meters) underwater and roughly 1,600 feet (488 meters) from the Titanic on the ocean floor. The Coast Guard is leading the investigation, in conjunction with several other government agencies in the U.S. and Canada.
Authorities have not disclosed details of the debris recovery, which could have followed several approaches, according to Carl Hartsfield, who directs a lab at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution that designs and operates autonomous underwater vehicles and has been serving as a consultant to the Coast Guard.
“If the pieces are small, you can collect them together and put them in a basket or some kind of collection device,” Hartsfield said Monday. Bigger pieces could be retrieved with a remote-operated vehicle, or ROV, such as the one brought to the wreckage site by the Canadian ship Horizon Arctic to search the ocean floor. For extremely big pieces, a heavy lift could be used to pull them up with a tow line, he said.
Representatives for Horizon Arctic did not respond to requests for comment. The ROV’s owner, Pelagic Research Services, a company with offices in Massachusetts and New York, is “still on mission” and cannot comment on the investigation, company spokesperson Jeff Mahoney said Wednesday.
“They have been working around the clock now for 10 days, through the physical and mental challenges of this operation,” Mahoney said.
Analyzing the recovered debris could reveal important clues about what happened to the Titan, and there could be electronic data recorded by the submersible’s instruments, Hartsfield said.
“So the question is, is there any data available? And I really don’t know the answer to that question,” he said Monday.
The Transportation Safety Board of Canada, which is conducting a safety investigation into the Titan’s Canadian-flagged mother ship, the Polar Prince, said Wednesday that it has sent that vessel’s voyage data recorder to a lab for analysis.
Stockton Rush, the Titan’s pilot and CEO of OceanGate Expeditions, the company that owned the submersible, was killed in the implosion along with two members of a prominent Pakistani family, Shahzada Dawood and his son Suleman Dawood; British adventurer Hamish Harding; and Titanic expert Paul-Henri Nargeolet.
OceanGate is based in the U.S. but the submersible was registered in the Bahamas.
The company charged passengers $250,000 each to participate in the voyage. The implosion of the Titan has raised questions about the safety of private undersea exploration operations. The Coast Guard wants to use the investigation to improve the safety of submersibles.
JUNE 28, 2023:
PORTLAND, Maine (AP) — Debris from the lost submersible Titan has been returned to land after a fatal implosion during its voyage to the wreck of the Titanic captured the world’s attention last week. The return of the debris to port in St. John’s, Newfoundland and Labrador, is a key piece of the investigation into why the submersible imploded, killing all five on board. Twisted chunks of the 22-foot submersible were unloaded at a Canadian Coast Guard pier on Wednesday (June 28, 2023). Pelagic Research Services, a company that owns a remote-operated vehicle involved in the search, said in a statement on Wednesday that it has completed offshore operations.
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JUNE 26, 2023:
UNDATED (AP)- An international group of agencies is investigating the loss of the Titan submersible, seeking to determine what caused it to implode while carrying five people to the Titanic. Investigators from the U.S. Coast Guard, the U.S. National Transportation Safety Board, the Transportation Safety Board of Canada, the French marine casualties investigation board and the United Kingdom Marine Accident Investigation Branch are working closely together on the probe of the June 18, 2023, accident that drew worldwide attention. Evidence is being collected in the port of St. John’s, Newfoundland, in coordination with Canadian authorities. U.S. Coast Guard Capt. Jason Neubauer, that agency’s chief investigator, did not give a timeline for the investigation.
JUNE 24, 2023:
UNDATED (AP)- The wrecks of the Titanic and the Titan sit on the ocean floor, separated by 1,600 feet (490 meters) and 111 years of history. How they came together unfolded over an intense week that raised temporary hopes and left lingering questions.
JUNE 23, 2023:
Extended version:
JUNE 22, 2023, UPDATE 3:
UNDATED (AP)- The Coast Guard says underwater sounds and banging noises detected in the search area for the Titan were likely unrelated to the missing submersible. The sounds, heard over two days, gave hope to searchers and those watching the massive effort unfold since Sunday (June 18, 2023), when the vessel was reported missing, but ultimately seems irrelevant. Experts say the ocean floor is a “noisy” place and a potential connection between the banging and the Titan were unlikely. Debris from the Titan, which suffered a catastrophic implosion that killed all five men aboard, was found near the Titanic shipwreck deep in the North Atlantic waters.
JUNE 22, 2023, UPDATE 2:
UNDATED (AP)- The pilot and four passengers of a missing submersible that disappeared en route to the wreckage of the Titanic are believed to be dead, the expedition company said Thursday (June 22, 2023).
Pilot and chief executive Stockton Rush, along with passengers Shahzada Dawood and his son Suleman Dawood, Hamish Harding, and Paul-Henri Nargeolet “have sadly been lost,” OceanGate Expeditions said in a statement.
OceanGate did not provide details when the company announced the “loss of life” in a statement or how officials knew the crew members perished. The Titan’s 96-hour oxygen supply likely ended early Thursday.
OceanGate has been chronicling the Titanic’s decay and the underwater ecosystem around it via yearly voyages since 2021.
Later Thursday, U.S. Coast Guard officials said the search had uncovered parts of the Titan consistent with an implosion. The Coast Guard said the pieces were discovered within the search area by a remotely operated underwater robot.
The Titan was estimated to have about a four-day supply of breathable air when it launched Sunday morning in the North Atlantic — but experts have emphasized that was an imprecise approximation to begin with and could be extended if passengers have taken measures to conserve breathable air. And it’s not known if they survived since the sub’s disappearance.
Rescuers have rushed ships, planes and other equipment to the site of the disappearance. On Thursday, the U.S. Coast Guard said an undersea robot sent by a Canadian ship had reached the sea floor, while a French research institute said a deep-diving robot with cameras, lights and arms also joined the operation.
Authorities have been hoping underwater sounds might help narrow their search, whose coverage area has been expanded to thousands of miles — twice the size of Connecticut and in waters 2 1/2 miles (4 kilometers) deep. Coast Guard officials said underwater noises were detected in the search area Tuesday and Wednesday.
Jamie Pringle, an expert in Forensic Geosciences at Keele University, in England, said even if the noises came from the submersible, “The lack of oxygen is key now; even if they find it, they still need to get to the surface and unbolt it.”
The Titan was reported overdue Sunday afternoon about 435 miles (700 kilometers) south of St. John’s, Newfoundland, as it was on its way to where the iconic ocean liner sank more than a century ago. OceanGate Expeditions, which is leading the trip, has been chronicling the Titanic’s decay and the underwater ecosystem around it via yearly voyages since 2021.
By Thursday morning, hope was running out that anyone on board the vessel would be found alive.
Dr. Rob Larter, a marine geophysicist with the British Antarctic Survey, emphasized the difficulty of finding something the size of the submersible, which is about 22 feet (6.5 meters) long and 9 feet (nearly 3 meters) high.
“You’re talking about totally dark environments,” in which an object several dozen feet away can be missed, he said. “It’s just a needle in a haystack situation unless you’ve got a pretty precise location.”
Newly uncovered allegations suggest there had been significant warnings made about vessel safety during the submersible’s development.
Broadcasters around the world started newscasts at the critical hour Thursday with news of the submersible. The Saudi-owned satellite channel Al Arabiya showed a clock on air counting down to their estimate of when the air could potentially run out.
Captain Jamie Frederick of the First Coast Guard District said a day earlier that authorities were still holding out hope of saving the five passengers onboard.
“This is a search-and-rescue mission, 100%,” he said Wednesday.
Retired Navy Capt. Carl Hartsfield, now the director of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Systems Laboratory, said the sounds detected have been described as “banging noises,” but he warned that search crews “have to put the whole picture together in context and they have to eliminate potential manmade sources other than the Titan.” Frederick acknowledged Wednesday that authorities didn’t what the sounds were.
The report of sounds was encouraging to some experts because submarine crews unable to communicate with the surface are taught to bang on their submersible’s hull to be detected by sonar.
The U.S. Navy said in a statement Wednesday that it was sending a specialized salvage system that’s capable of hoisting “large, bulky and heavy undersea objects such as aircraft or small vessels.”
The Titan weighs 20,000 pounds (9,000 kilograms). The U.S. Navy’s Flyaway Deep Ocean Salvage System is designed to lift up to 60,000 pounds (27,200 kilograms), the Navy said on its website.
Lost aboard the vessel is pilot Stockton Rush, the CEO of OceanGate. His passengers are: British adventurer Hamish Harding; Pakistani businessman Shahzada Dawood and his son Suleman; and French explorer and Titanic expert Paul-Henry Nargeolet.
In the first comments from Pakistan since the Titan vanished, Pakistani Foreign Ministry spokesperson Mumtaz Zahra Baloch said Thursday that officials have confidence in the search efforts.
“We would not like to speculate on the circumstances of this incident and we would also like to respect the wishes of the Dawood family that their privacy be respected,” she said.
At least 46 people successfully traveled on OceanGate’s submersible to the Titanic wreck site in 2021 and 2022, according to letters the company filed with a U.S. District Court in Norfolk, Virginia, that oversees matters involving the Titanic shipwreck.
One of the company’s first customers characterized a dive he made to the site two years ago as a “kamikaze operation.”
“Imagine a metal tube a few meters long with a sheet of metal for a floor. You can’t stand. You can’t kneel. Everyone is sitting close to or on top of each other,” said Arthur Loibl, a retired businessman and adventurer from Germany. “You can’t be claustrophobic.”
During the 2 1/2-hour descent and ascent, the lights were turned off to conserve energy, he said, with the only illumination coming from a fluorescent glow stick.
The dive was repeatedly delayed to fix a problem with the battery and the balancing weights. In total, the voyage took 10 1/2 hours.
The submersible had seven backup systems to return to the surface, including sandbags and lead pipes that drop off and an inflatable balloon.
Nick Rotker, who leads underwater research for the nonprofit research and development company MITRE, said the difficulty in searching for the Titan has underscored the U.S.’s need for more underwater robots and remotely operated underwater vehicles.
“The issue is, we don’t have a lot of capability or systems that can go to the depth this vessel was going to,” Rotker said.
Nicolai Roterman, a deep-sea ecologist and lecturer in marine biology at the University of Portsmouth, England, said the disappearance of the Titan highlights the dangers and unknowns of deep-sea tourism.
“Even the most reliable technology can fail, and therefore accidents will happen. With the growth in deep-sea tourism, we must expect more incidents like this.”
JUNE 22, 2023, UPDATE:
UNDATED (AP)- The U.S. Coast Guard says an underwater vessel has located a debris field near the Titanic in the search for a missing submersible with five people aboard, a possible breakthrough in an increasingly urgent around-the-clock effort. The Coast Guard’s post on Twitter gave no details, such as whether officials believe the debris is connected to the Titan, which was on an expedition to view the Titanic’s wreckage. The search passed the critical 96-hour mark Thursday morning (June 22, 2023) when breathable air could have run out. The Titan was estimated to have about a four-day supply of breathable air when it launched Sunday morning in the North Atlantic.
JUNE 22, 2023:
UNDATED (AP)- The search for the submersible vessel carrying five people that disappeared while on an expedition to view the wreckage of the Titanic is nearing the critical 96-hour mark. A growing number of aircraft, ships and underwater equipment from the U.S., Canada and France have been searching for the Titan submersible, which was estimated to have a 96-hour supply of breathable air when it launched Sunday morning (June 18, 2023) in the North Atlantic. That means the deadline to find and rescue the sub is roughly between 6 a.m. EDT (1000 GMT) and 8 a.m. EDT (1200 GMT), based on information the U.S. Coast Guard and the company behind the expedition have provided.
JUNE 21, 2023, UPDATE 3:
UNDATED (AP)- The daunting search and rescue effort for the Titan is rushing experts and specialized underwater equipment together by land, by air and by sea to find the submersible before its oxygen runs out. A remotely operated vehicle, known as an ROV, that can scan the sea floor was flown to Canada on Tuesday (June 20, 2023) and is expected to arrive at the Titanic site on Thursday morning. A Canadian maritime company says the equipment is among the most specialized in the world and can reach the North Atlantic’s depths.
JUNE 21, 2023, UPDATE 2:
UNDATED (AP)- The U.S. Coast Guard says more underwater noises have been heard in the area where rescuers are searching for a submersible that went missing in the North Atlantic while bringing five people down to the wreck of the Titanic. Coast Guard officials said Wednesday (June 21, 2023) that the sounds were detected by a Canadian surveillance vessel. The news provided a glimmer of hope three days after the Titan disappeared. But even those who expressed some optimism warned that many obstacles remain. Search crews need to pinpoint the vessel’s location, reach it, and bring it to the surface before the passengers’ oxygen supply runs out.
JUNE 21, 2023, UPDATE:
UNDATED (AP)- Underwater noises detected by a surveillance aircraft provided a measure of hope Wednesday (June 21, 2023) as search vessels working against long odds scoured the North Atlantic for a submersible that vanished while bringing five people down to the wreck of the Titanic. But even those who expressed some optimism warned that many obstacles remain. Search crews need to pinpoint the vessel’s location, reach it, and bring it to the surface before the passengers’ oxygen supply runs out. The U.S. Coast Guard did not elaborate on what rescuers believed the noises could be. Estimates suggest the vessel, which hasn’t been heard from since Sunday, has as little as a day’s worth of oxygen left.
JUNE 21, 2023:
UNDATED (AP)- A Canadian military surveillance aircraft has detected underwater noises as a massive operation searched in a remote part of the North Atlantic for a submersible that vanished while taking five people down to the wreck of the Titanic. A statement early Wednesday (June 21, 2023) from the U.S. Coast Guard did not elaborate on what rescuers believed the noises could be. However, it offered a glimmer of hope for those now lost aboard the Titan as estimates suggest as little as a day’s worth of oxygen could be left if the vessel is still functioning. Meanwhile, questions remain on how teams could reach the lost submersible, which could be as deep as about 12,500 feet below the surface near the watery tomb of the historic ocean liner.
JUNE 20, 2023, UPDATE:
UNDATED (AP)- The U.S. Coast Guard says a search covering 10,000 square miles (26,000 square kilometers) has turned up no signs of a missing submarine off New England. Authorities made the announcement Tuesday morning (June 20, 2023) at a news conference in Boston, saying the search had “not yielded any results” but would continue. Rescuers were racing against time to find the submersible before the oxygen supply runs out for five people who were on a mission to document the wreckage of the Titanic.
JUNE 20, 2023, UPDATE:
BOSTON (AP) — A renowned Titanic expert, a world-record holding adventurer and two members of one of Pakistan’s wealthiest families and the CEO of the company leading an expedition to the world’s most famous shipwreck are facing critical danger aboard a small submersible that went missing in the Atlantic Ocean. The race is on to find the Titan, which has an oxygen supply that is expected to run out at about 6 a.m. Thursday (June 22, 2023). The people on board include British businessman and world-record holding adventurer Hamish Harding; Titanic expert Paul-Henry Nargeolet, who has made multiple trips to the wreck; and businessman Shahzada Dawood and his son Suleman. OceanGate CEO and founder Stockton Rush is also aboard.
JUNE 20, 2023:
UNDATED (AP)- Rescuers in a remote area of the Atlantic Ocean are racing against time to find a missing submersible carrying five people on a mission to document the wreckage of the Titanic. The submersible named the Titan, part of a mission by OceanGate Expeditions, carried a pilot, a renowned British adventurer, two members of an iconic Pakistani business family and another passenger. Authorities reported the vessel overdue Sunday night (June 18, 2023) about 435 miles south of St. John’s, Newfoundland. Every passing minute, however, puts the Titan’s crew at greater risk. The submersible had a 96-hour oxygen supply when it put to sea at roughly 6 a.m. Sunday.
Extended version:
JUNE 19, 2023:
UNDATED (AP)- A search is underway for a missing submersible that carries people to view the wreckage of the Titanic. Canadian officials say the five-person submersible was reported overdue Sunday night (June 18, 2023) about 435 miles south of St. John’s, Newfoundland. The search is being led by the U.S. Coast Guard. The owner of the ship that launched the submersible confirmed that it was operated by OceanGate Expeditions. That company has been operating annual voyages since 2021 to the wreckage of the iconic ocean liner. In a statement, the company said it is working to bring the crew back safely.
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