An Oceangate company submersible disappeared this Sunday more than 600 kilometers south of Saint John, on the island of Newfoundland (Canada). Around 4 in the morning, the descent began towards the remains of the ocean liner. titanicat a depth of 3,960 meters, where it sank in April 1912. Approximately 1 hour and 45 minutes later, all contact with the vessel was lost.
the submersible Titan, from the Ocean Gate company, carried four people, in addition to the pilot. Each passenger pays about $250,000 to participate in the expedition on this ship made of titanium-reinforced carbon fiber filaments. This material (carbotanium or carbotitanium) is used for the manufacture of aircraft and for high competition cars.
The oxygen stored in the tanks is enough to breathe for 96 hours, which gives its occupants a margin until Thursday morning if they maintain a normal respiratory rate. In stressful situations, this increases and, therefore, oxygen consumption accelerates.
Search among the remains of the Titanic
Ocean Gate Expedition was created in 2009 with the idea of expanding the exploration of the deepest ocean, a part of the earth’s surface that is still very little explored. The company offers tourist trips to the locations of famous shipwrecks or to see the seabed: It has also participated in expeditions for scientific and commercial purposes: according to its website, it has carried out 14 expeditions and more than 200 dives in the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans. .
Titan is one of the three submersibles that it owns and is the one that can reach the deepest. After two failed attempts, managed to travel to the Titanic six times in 2021 and seven the following year. There she recorded images like these.
Now, finding his position to achieve a rescue is not easy. The submersible does not have direct communication with the outside, although it has a sonar (Teledyne BlueView 2D) for navigation with which it could try to locate rescue devices. It has connections with Starlink satellites, Elon Musk’s company that provides internet through space, but at the bottom of the sea it does not work.
He Titan It is equipped with ballast to facilitate its immersion and it can be released to re-emerge, which is why air and naval resources have been deployed in the area to locate the submersible if it has managed to reach the sea surface. To reach the bottom of the sea, work is being done on the use of a small unmanned submarine with the capacity to reach 4,000 meters from the bottom and which maintains the connection with the operator on the surface so that he can guide it and collect the data it collects. machine.
The seabed of the area where it was submerged is characterized by a chasm where the titanic after its sinking and an environment full of remains of the ship that make the underwater incursion dangerous and the use of sonar to locate the submersible. This device identifies objects by the echo of the sound waves it emits. The greater the number of remains of the titanicthe more difficult it is to distinguish a singular element.
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