Search vessel reaches ocean floor as oxygen on Titanic Sub believed to have run out
A search vehicle is on the ocean floor looking for the missing Titan submersible with five people aboard, as the oxygen time limit passes a critical mark.
A remote operated vehicle has reached the sea floor and is searching for the missing OceanGate Titan submersible and its five occupants.
The news comes amid fears that oxygen inside the vessel, if it is still intact, may have run out.
The Titan descended into the North Atlantic, on an expedition to see the wreck of the Titanic, early on Sunday morning local time with 96 hours of oxygen onboard. It was due to run out of oxygen at around 9pm Thursday AEST.
A Canadian aircraft detected banging noises on Tuesday and Wednesday using sonar listening devices, but efforts to pinpoint its source had failed.
The chief co-ordinator of the multinational rescue mission said on Thursday morning local time that the focus remained on rescuing the crew alive.
“We continue to find in particularly complex cases that people’s will to live really needs to be accounted for as well. And so we’re continuing to search and proceed with rescue efforts,” the US Coast Guard’s Rear Admiral John Mauger told NBC’s Today show.
The Canadian vessel Horizon Arctic has deployed an ROV that has reached the sea floor and began its search for the missing sub. #Titanic
— USCGNortheast (@USCGNortheast) June 22, 2023
The US Coast Guard also tweeted that a Canadian craft had reached the ocean floor, about 13,000 feet below the surface.
“The Canadian vessel Horizon Arctic has deployed an ROV (remotely operated vehicle) that has reached the sea floor and began its search for the missing sub,” the tweet read.
It added that “The French vessel L’Atalante is preparing their ROV to enter the water.”
The search was due to be reinforced by high-tech vessels and aeroplanes as the hunt for the missing seacraft continued into a fifth day.
The Coast Guard said that among additions to the search effort was a Magellan ROV, a uniquely equipped vessel whose use was requested by the Explorers Club group early on in the search.
A friend of two passengers on the submersible said their experience would help them to remain calm and try to slow down the consumption of oxygen.
Per Wimmer told a CNN broadcast that the adventurers on board “would no doubt know what it means to slow down, take it easy, and use as little oxygen as possible, and therefore extend the potential timeline as much as possible”.
Wimmer said that OceanGate CEO Stockton Rush, who is in the vessel, knew “the ins and outs of how this submersible works”.
Magellan have ROV - remote operated vehicles - that were recently used to produce the first ever digital scan of the Titanic shipwreck. The deep-water investigation specialist used two submarines to produce 700,000 images of the wreck, which were then made into a moving scan. pic.twitter.com/rKbnS9JRaA
— Alexandra Spiceley (@AlexSpiceley) June 22, 2023
Chances of a successful rescue ‘dwindling’
The area of the search is roughly the size of the US state of Connecticut.
Captain Jamie Frederick of the First Coast Guard District said they had to remain “optimistic and hopeful” during a press conference on Wednesday, but chances of finding the crew alive are dwindling.
“Sometimes you’re in a position where you have to make a tough decision. We’re not there yet,” Mr Frederick admitted, adding it remained a search-and-rescue mission “100 per cent”.
The president of the Explorers Club, which has two members on the Titan - Paul-Henry Nargeolet and Hamish Harding - wrote a letter to members overnight insisting there is still “good cause for hope”.
Richard Garriott has been regularly updating the organisation with news from the scene, with his latest note offering optimism despite the dire situation.
“We continue to come together for our friends, their families and the ideals of the Explorers Club, and the cause of safe scientific exploration of extreme environments,” he wrote.
“There is good cause for hope, and we are making it more hopeful.”
Families arriving at operations hub
The wife and daughter of missing Titanic wreck tourists Shahzada and Suleman Dawood, have travelled to be near the extensive rescue and recovery operation off Newfoundland but hopes have faded of finding any of the five on board alive.
Overnight rescuers intensified their desperate search for the lost submersible at the Titanic wreck despite the 96 hour window of oxygen supply ending.
Further deep sea vehicles, including a specialist French craft have arrived at the remote site where the Titanic sunk in 1912, which can reach the 3800m level of the sea floor in that area.
Former US Navy diver Bobbie Scholley said the 96 hours of emergency oxygen on board the submersible Titan was not a specific target.
“I know the search teams are not focused on that being a hard and fast number,’’ Captain Scholley told BBC. This will continue to be a rescue mission even past that number.”
The 96 hours ended shortly after 9pm Thursday night Australian time.
Captain Jamie Frederick of the US Coast Guard said shortly before the deadline:“ Sometimes you’re in a position where you have to make a tough decision. We’re not there yet. We have to remain optimistic and hopeful.”
Of the five men on board, three are highly experienced divers, including the ex-French navy diver Paul Henri Nargeolet, known as “Mr Titanic” who would have been helping to keep the anxiety and breathing rate of Mr Dawood, 48, and his son Suleman, 19, as low as possible.
Mr Dawood’s distraught wife, Christine, and his daughter Alina, who live in Surbiton, London, are near the site to get the latest information from the authorities, family members said.
Wendy Rush, wife of Oceangate Expedition founder Stockton Rush, and the company’s communications director, has ancestral connections to the Titanic. Her great great grand parents were two of the Titanic’s 1500 victims, the Macy owner Isidor Straus and his wife Ida.
The fifth missing person British millionaire Hamish Harding holds various diving Guinness world records including diving to the lowest depth of the Mariana Trench.
The cold temperatures inside the sub, inducing a state of hypothermia, may also slow down the breathing.
Other experts have warned the oxygen supply was only one aspect, with question marks about the dispersal of carbon dioxide build-up. If the Titan has lost power or the batteries run out stopping the filtration of air, the men will have fallen unconscious and died of carbon poisoning.
“As levels of carbon dioxide build up, then it becomes sedative, it becomes like an anaesthetic gas, and you will go to sleep.” Dr Ken Ledez, hyperbaric medicine expert at Memorial University in St John’s, Newfoundland, told the BBC.
Late Wednesday the French research vessel L’Atalante and the unmanned robot called Victor 6000 arrived on site. Victor 6000 has arms which can cut cables or help the Titan be freed if it is trapped in Titanic wreckage. The US Navy is providing a giant winch, the Flyaway Deep Ocean Salvage System, which is on board the Horizon Artic.
But first the rescue teams, comprising US military, the French and British specialists and the US and Canadian coastguards must locate exactly where the submersible is.
Earlier in the week sonar buoys dropped over the site detected some banging noises raising hopes that the men were still alive and the Titan was still intact.
Oil and gas magnate Oisin Fanning has been inside the Titan for two trips to the Titanic and said all would have been conserving their energy from day one and predicted the oxygen will “last a lot longer, they know their business”. He said there were so many drills and procedures around the OceanGate Expedition sub operations that “as a client, I got bored’’.
However other passengers have spoken about repeated electrical and communications issues with the Titan.
German adventurer Arthur Loibl, 60, said “it was a suicide mission back then” describing how his first voyage in 2021 was abandoned because of electrical problems.
The chief executive of OceanGate Expeditions, who is one of five people currently missing in the North Atlantic on the Titan submersible, had previously admitted to “breaking some rules” and went as far as saying safety was “pure waste”.
Stockton Rush, the exploration company’s founder and visionary, admitted in an interview last year the Titanic mission was ripe with danger and anyone with fears over his capabilities to produce a safe experience shouldn’t “get out of bed”.
“At some point, safety just is pure waste,” the 61-year-old told CBS journalist David Pogue in an astonishing revelation.
“I mean, if you just want to be safe, don’t get out of bed. Don’t get in your car. Don’t do anything.”
Pogue, who was a passenger onboard the same vessel during an expedition last year, has since revealed they too got lost during the tour.
“On my expedition last summer, they did indeed get lost for about 5 hours,” Pogue tweeted.
“They could still send short texts to the sub, but did not know where it was. It was quiet and very tense, and they shut off the ship’s internet to prevent us from tweeting.”
In another interview, Rush boasted about breaking rules, drawing inspiration a World War military general.
“I think it was General MacArthur who said you’re remembered for the rules you break,” Rush said in a video interview with Alan Estrada.
“And I’ve broken some rules to make this. I think I’ve broken them with logic and good engineering behind me.”
Rush’s comments come after it was revealed the marine director at OceanGate was fired after raising warnings over serious flaws in the craft in 2018.
David Lochridge was given 10 minutes to clear his desk after delivering a report outlining his fears over safety concerns to Rush.
Those concerns included Mr Lochridge’s worry that “visible flaws” in the carbon fibre supplied to OceanGate raised the risk of small flaws expanding into larger tears during “pressure cycling.”
Wendy Rush, the wife of the OceanGate CEO, is a descendant of two victims of the 1912 disaster which saw the Titanic sink after colliding with an iceberg.
Ms Rush is the great-great-granddaughter of retailing magnate Isidor Straus and his wife Ida.
The pair were two of the wealthiest passengers aboard the doomed vessel, co-owning Macy’s department store, and were even immortalised in James Cameron’s 1997 Academy Award winning film.
According to the New York Times, survivors recalled seeing Mr Straus be refused a seat on a lifeboat as they were reserved for women and children.
Seeing her husband be denied a place, Mrs Straus exited the emergency vessel and remained on the ship, not wanting to be separated.
In the film, characters depicting the Straus’ can be seen comforting each other on a bed as the Titanic begins to sink.
Mr Straus’ body was recovered at sea roughly two weeks after the tragedy, while Mrs Straus’ has never been found.
A software security businessman and investor in OceanGate has provided an insight into the design of the Titan submersible and how it is constructed to resurface after 24 hours in case of emergency.
Aaron Newman, who attended the Titanic site aboard the sub in 2021, says the ballast which keep the vessel underwater are automatically released after a day.
“It is designed to come back up,” he told CNN. The heavy weights can be released by crew using a pneumatic pump or by rocking the ship back and forth.
The lines holding the ballast in place are also designed to fall apart after 24 hours.
‘Freezing cold, they may knock themselves out’
Ocean exploration experts have painted a grim picture of what the passengers on board the missing Titan submersible are experiencing amid a dwindling air supply.
With less than 20 hours of oxygen left, they may already be struggling to breathe and could have fallen unconscious.
Retired Navy Captain David Marquet, a former submarine captain, told CNN the passengers would be at best “freezing cold and very uncomfortable.”
“They’re freezing cold,” he said. “The water entirely surrounding the ship is at freezing or slightly below. When they exhale, their breath condenses. There’s frost on the inside of the parts of the submarine. They’re all huddled together trying to conserve their body heat. They’re running low on oxygen and they’re exhaling carbon dioxide.”
He said the submersible had a “limited ability” to absorb the exhaled carbon dioxide, which at high levels could trigger headaches, confusion and nausea.
“The oxygen and the carbon dioxide and the freezing are what they got to hold onto as long as possible to give the rescuers the time they need,” Captain Marquet said.
Those inside will be “resting, breathing as little as possible and trying to keep calm” to conserve energy, Joe MacInnis, who has made two trips to the wreck of the Titanic, told CNN.
Terry Virts, a friend of UK billionaire Harris Harding, who is on the Titan, told the BBC the passengers might use medication to “knock themselves out” to conserve oxygen.
He said: “[Staying calm], it’s the hardest thing to do. What someone had mentioned to me is that one of the protocols would be for the crew to take basically sleeping medicine, Benadryl, just knock yourself out.
“That slows your heart rate, it reduces oxygen consumption, and then the captain would stay awake and he’d be the guy banging on the walls.”
However experts warns that if the passengers could die before the oxygen runs out once the vessel’s carbon-dioxide scrubbers, which clean the gas from the atmosphere, fail or become saturated.
The carbon-dioxide increases in the atmosphere at that point would result in shortness of breath, headaches, tiredness, paranoia and seizures, and eventually death, Mike Tipton, professor of human and applied physiology at the extreme environments laboratory at the University of Portsmouth, told the Wall St Journal.
However Dr Ken Ledez, a hyperbaric medicine expert at Memorial University in St John’s, Newfoundland, said the passengers could survive after the oxygen runs out, with their individual metabolism being a major factor.
“It’s not like switching off a light, it’s like climbing a mountain,” he told the BBC.
“They’re going to do everything they can to reduce their oxygen consumption, they’re going to rest, they’re going to try to be as relaxed and calm as possible because they know that too much activity will cause more metabolism - creating more carbon dioxide.”
He added: “Hypothermia could be their friend”.
“There is a possibility if they cool down enough and lose conscience they could live through it. The heart beat can be really slow when cold,” he said.
“Could they go on a week after the limits? I doubt it. But some may survive longer than others.”
Meanwhile, the US Coast Guard have released a new graphic detailing the search pattern it is conducting.
It also confirmed reinforcement aircrafts and vessels are on their way from the defence forces of the UK, France, Canada and US.
“Sometimes you’re in a position where you have to make a tough decision. We’re not there yet,” said US Coast Guard captain Jamie Frederick, adding that it remained a search-and-rescue mission “100 per cent”.
The US Navy’s most sophisticated salvage system has arrived in St. John’s, Newfoundland, and crews are now preparing it for mobilisation.
The Flyaway Deep Ocean Salvage System (FADOSS) is capable of retrieving objects or vessels off the bottom of the ocean floor up to a depth of 20,000 feet, more than enough to reach the wreckage of the Titanic.
But before it can be used, it must be welded to the deck of a ship, a process which can take up to 24 hours, a navy official told reporters.
The US Coast Guard said this morning it had widened its search for the sub after metallic sounds of life were recorded by hi-tech sonar equipment.
First Coast Guard District Captain Jamie Frederick told reporters that searches by remote operated vehicles (ROVs) had “negative results.” However he insisted rescuers were “still hopeful,” with more specialised search “assets” set to arrive.
In total, five “surface assets” were searching for the Titan on Wednesday afternoon local time, along with two ROVs, he said. Officials expect to add five more surface assets in the next two days, and “several” ROVs by Thursday.
“We don’t know what [the noises] are to be frank with you,” Captain Frederick said. “The intent will be to continue to search in those areas where the noises were detected … then put additional ROVs down in the last known position where the original search was taking place.”
He said a “state of the art” ROV being sent by the French Navy would assist efforts; the French underwater drone called the Victor 6000 is capable of descending to depths of 6,000m, 2000m deeper than the Titan’s depth limit.
The size of the search has expanded to an area twice the size of Connecticut (which in turn is around the size of Sydney), and to a depth of more than 3km.
It comes as experts continue to express concerns over safety on the sub, including that the company declined a safety review of Titan, despite being warned its experimental designs could lead to “catastrophic” results that could impact the entire industry.
In 2018, the Marine Technology Society wrote to OceanGate CEO Stockton Rush outlining
the risks the company was taking over safety, including its decision not to pursue a certification review. If the sub had been certified, “some of this may have been avoided,” Will Kohnen, MTS president, told CNN.
The letter from MTS told Mr Rush he was “taking on a lot of risk and the risk you are taking might affect the entire industry.”
“Our apprehension is that the current experimental approach adopted by OceanGate could result in negative outcomes (from minor to catastrophic) that would have serious consequences for everyone in the industry,” the society added.
In a 2019 blog post on OceanGate’s website, the company defended its decision not to classify the sub, saying: “The vast majority of marine (and aviation) accidents are a result of operator error, not mechanical failure.”
Another issue concerning safety experts is that the hatch is bolted from the outside.
Maximilian Cremer, director of the ocean technology group at the University of Hawaii Marine Center, told The Washington Post the outside bolt does not fit regulatory standards.
“We are required by the American Bureau of Shipping, by our regulatory oversight, to have a tower, a structure you can climb out of the command sphere in case of emergency at sea surface,” Mr Cremer said. “Plus we can and are required to open under our own power, human power, to be able to open the main hatch.”
British explorer Chris Brown says he had paid a deposit to go on a previous OceanGate trip to the Titanic but had pulled out for safety reasons.
“I had a look at it, it just seemed quite a few risks that were outside my control,” said Mr Brown, a friend of British billionaire Harris Harding who is on the missing sub. “OceanGate were missing depth targets continuously. Parts of the sub in my view were a bit ad hoc. I just generally got a bit of a bad feeling, so I withdrew from the operation,” he told the Today program.
World clings to slim hope after sounds heard
The world was holding on to a remote hope late on Wednesday that the five men trapped thousands of metres underwater near the wreck of the Titanic could still be alive, after metallic sounds of life were recorded by hi-tech sonar equipment.
The US Coast Guard, which is leading the search operation for the missing deep-sea tourist submarine, confirmed a Canadian aircraft had detected some sort of “banging” at 30-minute intervals in the area where the craft had disappeared.
Sonar devices dropped into the sea had picked up the noise for four hours. However, frantic searches by remotely operated vehicles had failed to find the sub by Wednesday night, Australian time, as the clock ticked down until the men’s oxygen supply was due to run out.
CNN later revealed more sounds had been detected, reporting that “additional acoustic feedback was heard and will assist in vectoring surface assets and also indicating continued hope of survivors”.
Families of British-based billionaires Hamish Harding and Shahzada Dawood, Mr Dawood’s son Suleman, the OceanGate founder Stockton Rush and French explorer Paul-Henri Nargeolet took heart that the sounds eliminated one devastating theory – that the vessel imploded under extreme pressure at 3800m from a leak in the hull.
A friend of Mr Harding, Chris Brown, told the BBC: “There’s always hope. As an explorer, you never give up.”
The Explorers Club president Richard Garriot de Cayeux said “there is cause for hope”. Both Mr Harding and Mr Nargeolet are members of the club.
In a statement, Mr Garriot de Cayeux said: “We have much greater confidence that there is cause for hope, based on data from the field – we understand that likely signs of life have been detected at the site.”
Another Explorers Club member, noted shipwreck hunter David Mearns, told Britain’s Channel 4 that the tapping noises were “at least trying to encourage the rescue efforts to continue that they’ve heard something which suggests that the men are alive”.
But Jannicke Mikkelsen, a close friend of Mr Harding, told the BBC that the strain of the desperate situation was becoming overwhelming.
She said: “We are losing time, we’re losing the opportunity to find them alive. I’m nervous. I’m sick to my stomach with nerves. I’m terrified, I’m anxious. I’m not sleeping at the moment. I’m just hoping for good news.
“Every single second, every single minute feels like hours.”
Rescuers have recalibrated their estimation as to when the oxygen on board may run out after discovering that OceanGate Expedition staff on board the mother ship, Polar Prince, had waited for a long time after it failed to surface on schedule before reporting that the craft was in trouble on Sunday.
Regular contact with the sub was lost an hour and 45 minutes into the dive on Sunday morning but the US Coast Guard wasn’t alerted until 5.40pm, and the Canadian Coast Guard was informed at 9.13pm.
The US Coast Guard said the emergency oxygen on board was now expected to last until around Thursday afternoon, Australian time.
Submarine experts believe that the 6m-long vessel, called Titan, could have been stricken with a loss of power or become caught up in the Titanic’s vast wreckage by the region’s powerful currents.
A battery of military and Coast Guard aircraft was continuing to search the surface of the water in case the sub was bobbing about and the crew inside were unable for some reason to use its radio to call for help.
Meanwhile, new deep sea equipment – including two robotic underwater vehicles – was being rushed to the remote north Atlantic site of the wreck of the Titanic, some 600km off the coast of Newfoundland.
France’s national integrated marine science research institute announced its research vessel, Atlante – which includes the Victor 6000 autonomous robot – was on its way and due to arrive by the early hours of Thursday. French scientists say the robot can dive beyond the depth of the Titanic, which sits at 3800m.
The Massachusetts company Pelagic Research Services, which has a remote vehicle Odysseus 6K, confirmed it was providing critical support to the rescue effort as well.
PRS management said in a statement that the company was committed to helping bring the best possible outcome to this situation.
There continues to be confusion as to why the British company Magellan, which captured the 3D imagery of the Titanic wreck and which has sophisticated deep-sea equipment, including a specialised winch with a 7000m synthetic rope, has not been allowed into the area, despite requests from OceanGate Expeditions for it to help.
Magellan said it continued to stand ready to mobilise if given the go-ahead.
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