5 People in Underwater Titanic Expedition Have Been Lost at Sea

By: Nina He

On June 18th, five people went out in a submersible called Titan to see the remains of the Titanic.

Less than a week later, the U.S. Coast Guard declared the vessel lost at sea. The vessel disappeared somewhere off the coast of Newfoundland in the Pacific Sea. Many countries around the world sent supplies to search for the missing five.

On Thursday afternoon, the U.S. coast guard found remains of the submersible near the Titanic off Canada’s coast.

OceanGate Expeditions designed the submersible. Unlike a submarine, a submersible is smaller and usually remote-controlled. OceanGate CRO Stockton Rush, British billionaire Hamish Harding, French explorer Pail-Henri Nargeolet, and Pakistani businessman Shahzada Dawood and his son, Suleman, the missing crew, left on Sunday.

After an hour and a half of going underwater, the Titan lost contact with its support vessel when it was 700 kilometers from south of St. John’s, Newfoundland.

On Monday, June 19th, rescue efforts were made to find and save the passengers of the Titan. Oceangate Expeditions guessed the crew had about 96 hours, or four days, of air left.

By Wednesday, the searchers had covered an area about half of Nova Scotia looking for the lost crew. On Tuesday and Wednesday, the searchers heard banging noises from near the Titanic. They thought the noise might’ve come from the Titan, but the officials are starting to doubt that.

Three more ships arrived on Thursday, two of which had remotely controlled vehicles, or ROVs, on board. Early afternoon on the same day, Rear Admiral John Mauger, a U.S. coast guard, said in a news conference that one of the ROVs discovered a piece of Titan, the submersible, about half a kilometer away from the Titanic.

“The debris is consistent with a catastrophic implosion of the vessel,” Mauger said.

Officials don’t know when the implosion happened. At the conference, many people asked what happened that caused the implosion. Mauger said an investigation into the question will be starting soon.

“I offer my deepest condolences to the families,” he said. “I hope that this discovery provides some solace during this difficult time.”