Explainer - Missing Titanic submersible: what is the Titan tourist sub and what might have happened to it?
Explainer - Missing Titanic submersible: what is the Titan tourist sub and what might have happened to it?
What a nightmare scenario. Can you imagine being trapped inside, sitting on the ocean floor several miles beneath the surface, maybe having lost power? It’s dark as pitch. Control panels dead. Maybe you have some light from a cell phone. You try to control your breathing to conserve oxygen, but you’re all but certain this is where you’ll die, a fact that you have several days worth of air to contemplate. All the mistakes you’ll never get to right, the things you didn’t do, the family you’ll never see, the pets who’ll never understand why you abandoned them. Through the cold, narrow hull, you hear the gentle susurrations of the current, and that’s it. Could be you have a ring back home you were going to surprise your girlfriend with, and all you can think about is how long it’ll be after the air runs out before she finds it. Maybe someone weeps softly beside you.
Enough oxygen until maybe Thursday. Think about that. What must it smell like inside that cramped little sub? Sweat and body odor, obviously, but what do you do when four or five people need to piss and shit for almost a week? You can’t just contain that. Maybe someone has brought bags they can go in or something, but surely not enough for everyone for that long.
And how will everyone react? You know how you’re going to die, and make no mistake, every single person on that boat knows how horrible it is to suffocate to death, clawing at your throat for hours on end until their fingernails have broken from their nail beds. What if someone breaks? Decides they want to go out on different terms, starts fidgeting with a pocket knife or something? Do you let them? Just sit there and let it happen?
So there you are. It’s Wednesday. Power is out. Even cell phones with their little lights are dead. It’s cold, it reeks of human waste and the filth of unwashed bodies. The air, long since gone stale, is getting thin. No one noticed in the back there that Roy quietly bled out after secretly slitting his wrists, but now he’s starting to stink. Oh god, the absolute horror of a stench a rotting corpse must be in a tight space like that. A putrescence you can taste, thick like oil—which is exactly what the fat in his skin and body is turning into. Grease.
You’re essentially alone, in the dark, with a corpse, and the thinning oxygen is playing tricks on you. So much so in fact that you start to wonder if you hadn’t maybe heard Roy back there starting to move. What does his face look like there in the dark, blackening from bloat and rot? Are his eyes open, staring numbly into nothing, milky and dead?
That’s where my mind goes, at least. I don’t mean to make fun. It’s a horrible situation and I hope they’re rescued.
Horrific
Too bad the writers are on strike lol
This is unlikely. The sub has multiple (like seven I think) different ways of resurfacing, some of which are purely mechanical and work even with a complete power failure. It could’ve got trapped in a fishing net, but it would still be pinging in that case. There are only really two other scenarios: it’s resurfaced and is bobbing around in the sea (unlikely) or the pressure vessel failed and it was instantly crushed to the size of a tin can.
Edit: Also, running out of oxygen in a situation like this isn't horrible. The BBC once did a documentary about the most humane way to execute people and it settled on nitrogen-induced hypoxia. Here's the part where the presenter (a former British politician) experiences hypoxia: https://vimeo.com/83750163#t=2235s
Nitrogen-induced hypoxia is painless, but in a sub like that CO2 might turn out to be a big problem, and that is not painless.
But yeah, the pressure vessel is (or, probably, was) fiberglass. It's cheap to use but once it cracks it'll absolutely shatter – this is why "real" subs tend to use metal – and that's pretty much what I assume has happened. Either that or they've been bobbing on the surface with their air slowly running out, because the hatch can't be opened from the inside.
Ok can you please write a book about this whole ordeal? And where can I buy it?
Imagine if the lights are still on and they can see the titanic wreck as they lay stranded.
Do you die of suffocation or dehydration first?
It uses Elon Musk’s Starlink satellite technology to communicate, though it is unclear if it was the cause of the loss of contact.
Surely this is the surface vessel and not the sub. Starlink communications are around 11 GHz, which can only propagate a couple meters in salt water.
Yeah, there’s very little communication with the sub, just short text messages and sonic pings, both of which have gone silent.
As coffins go, it's pretty.
I heard a bit about this in NPR. I wonder what happened... this is the result of needing year over year profits and rushing into commercialization of Extreme Travel (Deep sea and Space)
Heard about this on the news yesterday, so terrifying. :(
I'm shocked that they go down there alone. Safe operating procedures for small boats in tourism is to go in groups of two. So if one boat loses power, the other can rescue it right away. It's amazing the Titan just goes down by itself without even an ROV tethered to the ship above next to it.
The CEO (who is on board) has complained about safety regs multiple times, so it's not that surprising that they're ignoring this one too.
It says he previously said the hull showed signs of fatigue, so it couldn't safely make it down to the Titanic anymore. But then, they just said actually it's fine and have been making trips down there anyway? And he voluntarily got on board himself? That's brave if nothing else.
As nobody else has said it, allow me to be the first.
Fuck. That.
Oh that’s terrible.
The other day I was watching a video about the USS Thresher imploding due to extreme pressure... on the plus side at least its a very very very quick way to go?
This is the video : Crush Depth: The Nightmarish Loss of USS Thresher