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The search continued Monday for a small submersible and five people reported missing during a dive to view the wreckage of the Titanic.
While the search is not complete, details have been uncovered about the vessel and the company behind it, but others remain unclear.
Here’s what we know — and don’t.
What happened?
The vessel carrying five people near the Titanic wreck in the North Atlantic has been missing since Sunday, prompting a search and rescue operation by the U.S. Coast Guard, the New York Times reported Monday.
The Coast Guard confirmed to the Times it was searching for the vessel after a Canadian research ship — MV Polar Prince — lost contact with a submersible during a dive east of Cape Cod, Mass. The search was underway in an area of the Atlantic Ocean about 700 kilometres south of Newfoundland.
“It is a remote area and it is a challenge to conduct a search in that remote area, but we are deploying all available assets to make sure that we can locate the craft and rescue the people on board,” said Rear Admiral John Mauger of the U.S. Coast Guard to the Times.
“The Coast Guard has sent two C-130 Hercules aircraft to search for the submersible on the surface of the water, and has been joined by a Canadian C-130, and a P8 aircraft equipped with underwater sonar capability,” the BBC reported Monday. “Canada’s defence department said that, along with the aircraft, the Canadian coast guard vessel Kopit Hopson was assisting in the search.”
What we know about the vessel
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- The Titan is a 6.4-metre manned submersible made of carbon fibre and titanium.
- The vessel is designed to carry five people to depths of up to 4,000 metres for “site survey and inspection, research and data collection, film and media production, and deep sea testing of hardware and software,” according to OceanGate’s website.
- The craft includes a large viewport to allow passengers to view their surroundings, and is lowered into the water with the help of what the company calls a “patented, integrated launch and recovery platform.”
- CEO Stockton Rush founded OceanGate in 2009.
- It carried out successful Titanic expeditions in 2021 and 2022, the website says.
What we know about who was on the vessel — and why
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- The vessel carried a combination of crew and tourists, who pay huge fees — around $168,000 per ticket in 2019 — to view the wreck site and participate in research tasks. That money is said to subsidize the company’s Titanic research mission.
- We only know the name of one man who was aboard the vessel — 59-year-old British billionaire, businessman and explorer Hamish Harding, BBC reported Monday.
- The company says its mission includes chronicling the deterioration of the wreck of the Titanic, which sank in 1912, leading to the deaths of more than 1,500 people.
- The expeditions capture photos and video to document the condition of the site, as well as the plants and animals in and around it. “What we’re doing is something that’s going to add to the historical record of the Titanic — what is it like now, how is it decaying, what kind of marine life is there,” Rush told The Canadian Press in 2019.
Where do the vessels leave from?
- The company’s YouTube channel says passengers depart from St John’s, N.L., aboard a surface vessel for an eight-day journey.
- The trips down to the Titanic wreck are monitored by specialists in a command centre aboard the ship.
- Guests are treated to lectures and conversations with scientists, and to help with research-related tasks.
What is safety like on board?
- The company says the submersible includes a real-time hull monitoring system, which makes it possible to analyze the effects of changing pressure on the submersible as it dives.
- It’s said to have a life-support system that lasts 96 hours.
- We don’t know whether or not the passengers are safe, though rescuers believe there’s still a lot of time in the vessel’s life-support system.
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