The US Coast Guard has reported this morning that a Canadian plane participating in the search for the missing submersible Titan, with five people on board, have detected “underwater noise”. The apparatus began its descent on Sunday to make an excursion towards the remains of the transatlantic titanic, sunk in 1912 at a depth of 3,800 meters more than 600 kilometers from Newfoundland, but lost track shortly after. Time is playing against the rescue operations, since it is estimated that the air reserve inside the bathyscaphe will run out on Thursday.
The noises detected have led the search teams, in which several countries participate, to relocate operations underwater “in an attempt to explore the origin of the sounds”, as explained by the Coast Guard in a series of tweets published first thing this Wednesday.
Canadian P-3 aircraft detected underwater noises in the search area. As a result, ROV operations were relocated in an attempt to explore the origin of the noises. Those ROV searches have yielded negative results but continue. 1/2
— USCG Northeast (@USCGNortheast) June 21, 2023
The Coast Guard has not provided further details about the nature or range of the sounds, or how they were picked up, although several US media have revealed that the noises were detected by Canadian planes at 30-minute intervals.
He Titan, operated by the American company OceanGate Expeditions, was built to remain underwater for 96 hours. On Sunday, he began the descent with five passengers, but lost communication with the surface after two hours of submersion. On board were British billionaire and explorer Hamish Harding, 58, president of the aviation company Action Aviation; experienced French explorer Paul Henry Nargeolet, 73, who has led half a dozen expeditions to the titanic; Shazada Dawood, a Pakistani administrator of a non-profit organization based in California and a British citizen, and his son Suleman, and Stockton Rush, the head of OceanGate. The cost of the tourist expedition is around $250,000 per person.
US and Canadian planes, as well as a ship equipped with a deep-sea submersible, continue to search the area of the disappearance, more than 7,600 square miles of open sea. More vessels are expected to arrive in the coming hours, including the ship Atalante sent by the French Government, also endowed with an underwater robot capable of explorations at great depth.
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