Missing Titanic Submarine Crew Declared Dead After ‘Catastrophic Implosion’
A former US Navy official has said that passengers onboard the Titan submersible would have died instantaneously after the implosion happened. He added that being stuck inside the vessel would have been a far worse alternative.
“Titanic” director worries implosion will have a negative impact on citizen explorers
Film director James Cameron said Thursday he’s worried that the Titan submersible’s implosion will have a negative impact on citizen explorers.
“These are serious people with serious curiosity willing to put serious money down to go to these interesting places,” the “Titanic” director told CNN’s Anderson Cooper. “I don’t want to discourage that. But I think that it’s almost now a lesson.
The takeaway is, make sure if you’re gonna go into a vehicle, whether it’s an aircraft or surface craft or a submersible, that it’s been through certifying agencies.”
James Cameron, director of the hit 1997 film “Titanic,” says news of the Titan submersible’s explosion “certainly wasn’t a surprise.”
Cameron, who has made 33 dives to the wreckage himself, told CNN’s Anderson Cooper that when he first heard the news of the Titan incident Monday morning, he connected with his small community in the deep submergence group and found out within about a half-hour that the submersible had lost communication and tracking, simultaneously.
“The only scenario that I could come up with in my mind that could account for that was an implosion,” he told Cooper on Thursday. “A shockwave event so powerful that it actually took out a secondary system that has its own pressure vessel and its own battery power supply which is the transponder that the ship uses to track where the sub is.”
Cameron said he did more digging and got some additional information that seemed to confirm that the submersible had imploded.
“I encouraged all of them to raise a glass in their honor on Monday,” Cameron said of his community group.
He said false-hopes kept getting dangled as search teams looked for the missing passengers over the following days.
“I watched over the ensuing days this whole sort of everybody-running-around-with-their-hair-on-fire search, knowing full well that it was futile, hoping against hope that I was wrong but knowing in my bones that I wasn’t,” Cameron told Cooper.
He expressed condolences for the families of the passengers.
Titanic submarine: What is ‘catastrophic implosion’
Titan submersible: It is the opposite of an explosion, in which an object violently collapses in on itself. At the extreme depth of the ocean, there is a tremendous amount of pressure on the submersible and any tiniest structural defect could be proven disastrous. Usually, the pressure on the surface is measured as 1 atmosphere. At the depth of the Titan wreck, the pressure is close to 60,000 pounds per square inch.
How researchers found Titan under the sea?
Canadian ship’s remotely operated vehicle, a kind of robot, found five major parts of the Titan submersible. The robots found the debris field on the ocean floor, only 1,600 feet from the bow of the Titanic wreck.
