Oceangate
On 18 June, an expedition organised by OceanGate Expeditions embarked on a journey to explore the wreckage of the Titanic. The deep-sea exploration company’s Titan submersible submerged into the sea about 1,450km east of Cape Cod, Massachusetts, and went missing in the Atlantic Ocean about 1 hour and 45 minutes after departure.
Immediately, a massive search was mounted, with aircraft and ships from the United States, Canada and other countries conducting rescue operations in the North Atlantic for days.
At time of publication, the location of the missing craft remains a mystery. So far, rescue efforts have focus on an area where Canadian aircraft detected underwater banging noises. Even as the search intensified, US Coast Guard officials claimed that the Titan’s air supply was expected to run out at around 6am EST on Thursday.
According to the latest update on 23 June, five different pieces of debris, including the Titan’s nose cone and total pressure chamber, were found on the ocean floor (approximately 1,600ft from the bow of the Titanic), by US Coast Guard officials. “The debris is consistent with a catastrophic loss of the pressure chamber,” the Commander of the First Coast Guard District, Rear Admiral John Mauger, said in a press conference.
The US Coast Guard also confirmed that a catastrophic implosion occurred to the Titan submersible, killing the five members on board, shortly after which OceanGate issued a statement saying it believed the passengers on board the Titan submersible have “sadly been lost” and called them “true explorers.”
— OceanGate Expeditions (@OceanGateExped) June 22, 2023
Who was on board
Hamish Harding, Shahzada and Suleman Dawood, Paul-Henry Nargeolet, and Stockton Rush
The five men aboard the Titan included billionaire adventurer Hamish Harding, a British businessman living in Dubai; and Shahzada Dawood, 48, a wealthy British businessman of Pakistani descent, and his 19-year-old teenage son, Suleiman. The Dawood family is, reportedly, one of the wealthiest families in Pakistan.
The missing submersible was also carrying Paul-Henri Nargeolet, a French Navy veteran known as “Mr Titanic” who led the first expedition to recover the ship in 1987. Over 35 years, he had participated in several expeditions to the wreck of the Titanic and conducted hundreds of hours of observation. The final member of the ill-fated team was Stockton Rush, the Founder and Chief Executive of OceanGate.
See below for the video showing how the implosion could have happened to the Titan submersible.
