The Titan, a submersible, went missing in June 2023 while exploring the Titanic shipwreck site. Here’s what we know about its disappearance.
On June 19, 2023, a private company called OceanGate, located in Everett, Wash., set out on an expedition to explore the Titanic shipwreck site, where the luxury steamship tragically sank on April 15, 1912, after hitting an iceberg.
The exploration was carried out using a submersible named the Titan, which ultimately lost communication with its mother ship about an hour and 45 minutes after it began its dive. And now the search is on to find the Titan and bring these folks home alive before their oxygen supply runs out.
So, you may be wondering: How did the Titan even disappear in the first place? Here’s what we know.
SOURCE: OCEANGATE
How did the Titan submersile go missing in the first place?
The Titan is currently believed to be lost in an area about 900 miles east of Cape Cod, Mass., in the North Atlantic, in water with a depth of about 13,000 feet. Equipped with 96 hours of oxygen, it began its expedition on Sunday for a trip to the wreckage site of the Titanic which was only supposed to last a few hours.
Clearly, things didn’t go as planned. But how and why?
Well, for starters, OceanGate is a fairly new company and didn’t even start these Titanic wreckage expeditions until 2021. It conducted one expedition that year and another in 2022. This current expedition was only the Titan’s third visit to the Titanic wreckage site.
Furthermore, before OceanGate even launched, there were safety concerns raised by leaders in the submersible craft industry.
In 2018, over three dozen leaders in the submersible craft industry signed a letter to OceanGate, that warned the company of its “experimental approach.” In the letter, which has since been obtained by New York Times, these experts claimed there were potential “catastrophic” problems with the submersible’s development and the planned voyage to the Titanic wreckage.
It remains uncertain to what extent OceanGate took these concerns into consideration.
As to why the Titan just vanished just shortly after beginning its exploration, Jim Bellingham, a Johns Hopkins University expert on deep-sea operations, told USA Today that there are three possibilities as to what happened.
He says it could be floating on the ocean’s surface after an electrical failure or some other mishap. The Titan could also have become buoyantly neutral, meaning it could be drifting anywhere between the surface and the ocean’s bottom. And lastly, the Titan could have gotten caught on something which is preventing it from floating to the surface.
Searchers hear banging sounds near where the Titan went missing.
In an internal email sent to the Department of Homeland Security leadership and obtained by Rolling Stone on June 20, the department shared that crews heard banging sounds in 30-minute intervals while searching the area where the Titan is believed to have disappeared.
The email mentioned the deployment of a P-8 Poseidon, a maritime patrol and reconnaissance aircraft, which has underwater detection capabilities when operated from the air. “The P8 heard banging sounds in the area every 30 minutes. Four hours later additional sonar was deployed, and banging was still heard,” the email read.
Unfortunately, the correspondence does not share details of what might have caused the banging sounds.
In a later update provided to CNN, it was noted that “additional acoustic feedback was heard and will assist in vectoring surface assets and also indicating continued hope of survivors.”
The search for the Titan and those five passengers continues.