The company that operated the submersible that went missing on Sunday said in a statement on Thursday that it believed all five people on board were believed to be dead.
OceanGate Expeditions said in a statement that “we now believe that our CEO Stockton Rush, Shahzada Dawood and his son Suleman, Hamish Harding, and Paul-Henri Nargeolet have sadly been lost.”
Search teams sent remote-controlled vehicles deep in the North Atlantic on Thursday as part of the international effort to locate the submersible that disappeared over the weekend, and within hours of being deployed to the ocean floor, one of the vehicles located what officials described as a “debris field”.
The US Coast Guard announced the discovery on Twitter and said that experts were assessing the findings from the vehicle, which was deployed to the sea floor by a Canadian ship, the Horizon Arctic. The agency said it would discuss the findings at a news briefing on Thursday afternoon.
For rescuers, the search for the pilot and four passengers aboard the submersible, the Titan, was always a race against time. When the submersible, a 22-foot-long vessel owned by OceanGate, lost contact with a chartered ship during a tour of the wreck of the Titanic on Sunday morning, it was more than halfway into its dive to the wreck of the Titanic, and it was believed to be equipped with only four days’ worth of oxygen.
Stockton Rush, the chief executive of OceanGate, was piloting the submersible. The four passengers were a British businessman and explorer, Hamish Harding; a British-Pakistani businessman, Shahzada Dawood, and his teenage son, Suleman; and a French maritime expert, Paul-Henri Nargeolet, who had been on over 35 dives to the Titanic wreck site.
The desperate search for the 6.7-metre Titan submersible had reached a critical stage on Thursday morning when the air supply for the five people on board was estimated to have nearly run out — or possibly run out.
The van-sized Titan, operated by the US-based OceanGate Expeditions, began what was to be a two-hour descent at 1200 GMT on Sunday but lost contact with its support ship.
The submersible set off with 96 hours of air, according to the company, which means the oxygen would likely have been exhausted by Thursday morning, assuming the Titan is still intact.
Precisely when depends on factors such as whether the craft still has power and how calm those on board are, experts say.
Another robot from a French research ship also dove towards the seabed on Thursday to search for signs of the Titan submersible.
Rescuers and relatives of the Titan’s five occupants took hope when the US Coast Guard said on Wednesday that Canadian search planes had recorded undersea noises using sonar buoys earlier that day and on Tuesday.
But remote-controlled underwater vehicles searching where the noises were detected did not yield results, and officials cautioned the sounds might not have originated from the Titan.
The Titanic, which sank in 1912 on its maiden voyage after hitting an iceberg, killing more than 1,500 people, lies about 1,450 km east of Cape Cod, Massachusetts, and 640 km south of St John’s, Newfoundland. The Titan’s deep-sea excursion to the shipwreck capped a tourist adventure for which OceanGate charges $250,000 per person.
“We’re waiting anxiously, we hardly sleep,” said Mathieu Johann, Nargeolet’s editor at his publisher Harper Collins.
Questions about Titan’s safety were raised in 2018 during a symposium of submersible industry experts and in a lawsuit filed by OceanGate’s former head of marine operations, which was settled later that year.
“If you’ve seen the Titanic debris field, there’ll be a thousand different objects that size,” said Jamie Pringle, a forensic geoscientist at Keele University in the UK. “It might be an endless task.”
Dr Rob Larter, a marine geophysicist with the British Antarctic Survey, emphasised the difficulty of even finding something the size of the sub — which is about 6.5 meters long and nearly 3 metres high.
New York Times News Service and Reuters
