Keys to understanding why the Titan submarine imploded

Mission of the submarine Titan descend to the bottom of the sea to see the remains of the Titanic, sunk in 1912 after colliding with an iceberg, it was supposed to last ten hours. Company Ocean Gate Expeditions owned and operated a submarine that was used to conduct deep sea expeditions. However, last Monday the company reported that it had had no contact with the submarine since Sunday. Since then, the US Coast Guard has launched a extensive search with the help of Canada to locate the device, which ended actually this Thursday, when it was confirmed that the remains found just 500 meters from the wreck of the Titanic belong to a submarine and match “with a catastrophic implosion”that is, fracture and collapse caused by greater pressure from the outside.

Why did the disaster happen?

Submarines are designed to withstand crushing pressures. At 4,000 meters underwater — the maximum depth Titan could reach — the pressure is about 400 times greater than at sea level. Any damage or failure to the vehicle’s hull could cause a leak resulting in an immediate implosion of the vessel.

“If the pressure plate fails catastrophically, it’s like a little bomb going off. The potential is that all the safety devices will be destroyed in the process,” he said. Guard Stefan Williams, Professor of Maritime Robotics at the University of Sydney.

Furthermore, the implosion would be almost instantaneous, lasting only milliseconds, according to Journal of physics: Series of conferences. Something similar happened in 1961 to the USS Thresher, a submarine believed to have exploded.

Magazine maritime history he notes that the event would have crushed the metal hull “like candy” and that “total destruction would have occurred too quickly for the people on board to cognitively recognize it.”

An implosion is basically the opposite of an explosion. Instead of pressure from the inside out, there is pressure from the outside rushing in. As with explosions, it is unlikely that much of the device will remain.

“I know it’s not much comfort to families and spouses, but died immediately. They didn’t even realize something was wrong,” said journalist David Pogue CNN.

Was the submarine safe?

James Cameronwho directed the film titanic and who dived 33 times to the wreck, suggests that there is a “terrible irony” in the loss of the submarine Titan and its crew and its similarity to the 1912 tragedy of the Titanic, which continued to sail despite the captain’s death. repeatedly warned of the presence of ice in front of the ship. “Now we have another shipwreck which unfortunately is based on the same principles of not heeding warnings,” he explained.

Cameron added that OceanGate had fired people at work, but did not specify why. The director says that some in the diving world, not directly including him, have written a letter to OceanGate warning, in his words, that it is “on the road to disaster”.

For his part, entrepreneur Guillermo Söhnlein, co-founder of OceanGate, dismissed criticism of the company’s security this Friday, saying people outside the company did not have “all the information” to comment.

Speaking to Britain’s BBC Radio 4, Söhnlein, an American of Argentine descent who left the company a decade ago but still owns a minority stake in it, said those commenting on matters related to the safety of the stricken submarine were not “fully informed”. .

“People continue to equate certification with safety and ignore the 14 years of development of the Titan submarine,” he complained. According to him, “every expert who weighs this, including [James] Cameron will also admit that they were not around when the submarine was designed, during the engineering process of the submarine, during the construction of the submarine, and especially not when the submarine underwent a rigorous test program.”

Söhnlein considered what happened to be “a tragic loss for the ocean research community”, although he pointed out that anyone who works in the ocean “is aware of the risks of working under such pressure and knows that at a certain moment they are in danger of suffering such an implosion.

Where exactly were the remains of Titan found?

Search teams detected sounds underwater, but they did not appear to be related to the location of the wreck, US Coast Guard Rear Admiral John Mauger said at a news conference.

Mauger claimed that the area of ​​debris on the surface, which was found earlier, led to Discovery of Titan’s tail cone and other pieces that were found on the ocean floor Thursday morning, 600 kilometers off the coast of Newfoundland and only 488 meters from the bow of the Titanic wreck.