What will happen when oxygen levels drop in Titanic sub
As the race against time to find the missing Titanic tourist submarine continues, experts explain the “horrible” things that could unfold.
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As the race against time to find the missing Titanic tourist sub continues, here’s what we know about the missing vessel and what may happen next.
HAS THE TITANIC SUB BEEN FOUND?
A massive search and rescue operation is still under way in the mid Atlantic after a tourist submarine carrying five people went missing during a dive to the wreck of the Titanic.
Contact with the small sub was lost about an hour and 45 minutes into its dive, the US Coast Guard said.
WHAT WILL HAPPEN WHEN OXYGEN LEVELS DROP?
The missing OceanGate submersible is believed to have a four-day emergency supply of oxygen, due to last until 9pm on Thursday AEST.
Professor Bruce Thompson, a lung expert and head of the school of health sciences at the University of Melbourne, said the passengers could begin to start feeling the horrific effects of oxygen deprivation before the emergency supply ran out.
Without having studied the craft itself, he said it was hard to determine when this would occur but said those on board would suffer hypoxia once oxygen levels halved.
“When you start running out of oxygen, you’re going to start getting breathless and you’re going to start feeling profoundly unwell and you’re getting what we call hypoxic, which is low oxygen levels,” he said.
“You start actually getting very confused and a lack of energy and potentially you start losing vision, and then eventually you’ll become unconscious. So that’s really very, very horrible.”
Frank Owen, a former Submarine Escape and Rescue Project Director with the Royal Australian Navy, said passengers could conserve oxygen at this point by keeping calm and even sleeping if they could, as panic makes people breathe faster.
Asked whether the skipper would have access to sleeping tablets or transquilisers, Mr Owen said it was unlikely.
HOW IS THE TITAN SUBMERSIBLE CONTROLLED?
The missing OceanGate submersible is controlled by a PlayStation controller and has one viewing window.
The vessel communicates with its mothership by text messages which are exchanged via a USBL (ultra-short baseline) acoustic system.
Professor Stefan Williams, an underwater robotics expert from the University of Sydney, said the big risk for submersibles was pressurisation.
“At 3800 metres, you’re experiencing nearly 400 times the atmospheric pressure,” he said.
“So you have to design those pressure vessels to withstand that kind of pressure and to ensure that they don’t collapse under the weight of the water above them.
“You also have to be very careful about corrosion and maintenance of these vehicles.”
WHAT COULD HAVE HAPPENED?
Professor Williams said the best case scenario was that the submersible would float up to the surface if it became buoyant through on-board safety systems, allowing rescuers to retrieve it
“Another scenario is that it is negatively buoyant, so it’s actually sunk to the bottom and has lost its power and communications,” he said.
“Worst case scenario is that they had a catastrophic failure of some component of the vehicle.”
Associate Professor Eric Fusil, director of the shipbuilding hub at Adelaide University, said the Titan could have become entangled, its hull could have been compromised, or there could have been a power blackout or electrical fire.
A fire could disable the vessel’s systems, but also create toxic fumes “that would poison the atmosphere and intoxicate the passengers, potentially incapacitating them,” he said.
Experts warned that if the Titan had descended too deep, the prospects for survival were slim.
“Even military nuclear-powered submarines are limited to depths between 0-500 m and could only use their sonars (active or passive) to detect any sign of the Titan, without a possibility to get closer,” Assoc Prof Fusil said.
“The clock is ticking, and any submariner/submersible deep divers know how unforgiving the Abyssal domain is: going undersea is as, if not more, challenging than going into space from an engineering perspective.”
COULD THE SUB BE TRAPPED IN THE TITANIC WRECKAGE?
Professor Williams said it was possible that the sub got too close to the Titanic in a bid to view the wreckage in the darkness underwater and became entangled.
“You have to get quite close and you’re looking through a relatively small porthole. The vessel is basically a big metal canister with a small viewpoint that you peer out through” he said.
“There’s some discussion in the community about much value there is really in these manned submersible systems as distinct from putting robotic platforms in where you get live camera feeds.”
WHO OWNS OCEANGATE?
The Washington-based privately held luxury tour company has been offering guided tours of the Titanic ’s wreckage, at a cost of $365,000 per passenger, for years.
OceanGate founder Stockton Rush, who is on board the missing vessel, founded the company in 2009.
The former aerospace engineer told CBS News in 2022 that the Titanic guided tours represent “a new type of travel”, blending adventure, luxury and history.
The firm bills the eight-day trip on its carbon-fibre submersible as a “chance to step outside of everyday life and discover something truly extraordinary”.
WHERE HAS THE TITANIC SUB GONE MISSING?
Titanic’s wreck lies around 700 kilometres south of St John’s, Newfoundland, off Canada’s east cost. The US Coast Guard is running the search with help from the Canadian Coast Guard.
HOW FAR DOWN IS THE TITANIC?
The world’s most famous shipwreck lies 3,800 metres down in the Atlantic. The largest ship of its time, the Titanic was built in Belfast and set sail for New York on its maiden voyage from Southampton in 1912.
It struck an iceberg and of the 2,200 passengers and crew on-board, more than 1500 died.
WHO IS MISSING ON THE TITANIC SUB?
Five people missing on board the submarine include British billionaire businessman and explorer Hamish Harding.
The 58-year-old Mr Harding is a serial adventurist and renowned explorer who has flown to space and holds three Guinness World Records including the longest time spent at full ocean depth during a dive to the deepest part of the Mariana Trench.
In August last year Mr Harding was inducted into The Living Legends of Aviation, an award honouring achievements in the aerospace industry to those who have made significant contributions to many areas of aviation including
Mr Harding has a pilot’s licence and is the chair of the Middle East chapter of the Explorers Club, an international organisation founded in New York in 1904 for advancement of exploration and scientific enquiry.
He is the chairperson and founder of Action Aviation, an aircraft brokerage company which is based in the UAE. Earlier this month he was part of the six-member crew of astronauts aboard the Jeff Bezos Blue Origin NS-21 sub-orbital rocket system which took off from a desert in Texas.
Harding holds a natural sciences and chemical engineering degree from the University of Cambridge.
He holds three Guinness World Records – fastest circumnavigation of the Earth via both poles by plane, greatest distance covered at full ocean depth and the greatest duration spent at full ocean depth.
Four years ago he directed a team of pilots and astronauts to achieve the first record in 46 hours, 40 minutes and 22 seconds to to mark the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing by Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin, according to the Living Legends of Aviation.
He has travelled more than once to the South Pole.
According to the awards body, he accompanied Mr Aldrin, the oldest person to reach the South Pole, aged 86, in 2016, and took his son Giles, 12, in 2020, who became the youngest person to access the South Pole.
In 2021, Harding was in a two-man submarine mission lasting 36 hours to the Challenger Deep in the Mariana Trench with American explorer Victor Vescovo, breaking records by crossing the ocean for four hours and 15 minutes travelling 4.6 kilometres along the seafloor.
Mr Harding is married to Linda, who is also on board the doomed sub, and he has two sons named Rory and Giles, as well as a stepdaughter named Lauren and a stepson, Brian Szasz.
The businessman took to social media just days before the voyage, saying he was “proud to finally announce” that he would be on board.
However, he later added that because of the “worst winter in Newfoundland in 40 years, this mission is likely to be the first and only manned mission to the Titanic in 2023”.
He later wrote: “A weather window has just opened up and we are going to attempt a dive tomorrow.”
A friend of the billionaire said she believes “he and his team are working methodically through their options” to bring the team on board the missing submersible back to the surface.
Jannicke Mikkelsen, a Norwegian explorer, wrote on Facebook: “Hamish is an experienced explorer and submersible operator. I strongly believe he and his team are working methodically through their options to bring the team back to surface.”
She added: “All we can do is wait, prepare for the worst, and hope for the best.”
Also on board is Paul-Henry Nargeolet, an underwater research program director at Premier Exhibitions, RMS Titanic.
Mr Nargeolet spent more than two decades in the French Navy, rising to the rank of Commander. He retired in 1986 and joined the French Institute for Research and Exploitation of Sea, leading deep submersibles and led the first recovery expedition of the Titanic in 1987.
Mr Nargeolet has “spent more time than any other” at the wreckage of the Titanic
Mr Nargeolet is considered a “leading authority” on the Titanic and has led several expeditions to the Titanic, and completed dozens of dives in the submersible himself, as well as supervising the recovery of thousands of artefacts, including a 20-ton section of the Titanic’s hull.
Stockton Rush is the 61-year-old CEO of OceanGate Inc the company operating the sub.
At the age of 19, Rush became the youngest jet transport-rated pilot in the world after obtaining his DC-8 Type/Captain’s rating at the United Airlines Jet Training Institute in 1981.
He has a BSE in Aerospace Engineering from Princeton University and an MBA from the UC Berkeley Haas School of Business.
The latest to be identified as being on the Titan are a prominent Pakistani businessman and his son.
Shahzada Dawood – the vice-chairman of Karachi-headquartered conglomerate Engro – and his son Suleman were aboard the vessel, a family statement said.
“We are very grateful for the concern being shown by our colleagues and friends and would like to request everyone to pray for their safety.”
Engro has an array of investments in energy, agriculture, petrochemicals and telecommunications. At the end of 2022, the firm announced a revenue of 350 billion rupees ($1.2 billion).
Shahzada’s father, Hussain Dawood, is regularly listed among Pakistan’s richest men by the domestic press.
Shahzada’s profile on Engro’s website said he also serves as a trustee on the board of The Dawood Foundation – a high-profile family education charity founded in 1960.
He was educated in the United States and Britain, the profile said.
Originally published as What will happen when oxygen levels drop in Titanic sub
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