DISAPPEARANCE OF THE TITAN

Titan, a submersible of the private company OceanGate, that lost contact with its mother ship Polar Prince after one hour and 45 minutes of its dive off the Canadian coast on Sunday, 18 June 2023, with five people on board most likely suffered a catastrophic implosion on its attempt to explore the Titanic shipwreck in the North Atlantic Ocean. Although intense search and rescue operations were carried out by the United States Coast Guard, United States Navy and Canadian Coast Guard along with several aircraft, commercial and research ships and remotely operated underwater vehicles (ROVs), instant death of all the passengers were confirmed with the discovery of a debris field, particularly the tail cone and landing frame, on the seafloor, 1600 feet (500 metres) from the bow of the Titanic, along with presumed human remains.

While more information regarding the submersible’s implosion will be revealed shortly, the five people onboard who are dead now included OceanGate chief executive Stockton Rush, British adventurer Hamish Harding, Pakistani businessman Shahzada Dawood and his son Suleiman, French explorer and Titanic expert Paul-Henri Nargeolet.

CAUSE OF THE IMPLOSION

A catastrophic implosion of a submersible occurs when it rapidly breaks up within milliseconds. When and where the Titan implosion took place still remains unclear. However, the catastrophic implosion responsible for the devastation of the submersible could have been due to significant force and speed when intense water pressure on the ocean floor is considered. The Titanic wreckage is at a depth of about 13,000 feet below the ocean surface. While the atmospheric pressure at sea level is 100 kilopascals, it keeps building up towards the seabed such that the water pressure at the site of Titanic remains is considered over 41,000 kilopascals. In that case, even a minute structural flaw could lead to an implosion, which would have caused the instantaneous death of the passengers. The pattern of the debris suggests that at some point in the Titan's journey, there was a leak such that the structural defect caused the pressure outside to compress the vessel and disintegrate its carbon fibre body. According to the Coast Guard, the implosion probably had happened before the rescue operations as the highly sensitive sonobuoys did not pick up any acoustic signal indicating an implosion.

OCEANGATE AND TITAN SUBMERSIBLE

OceanGate is a US private company in Everett, Washington, founded by Stockton Rush and Guillermo Sohnlein in 2009 that provides crewed submersibles for tourism, industry, research, and exploration. Since 2010, it has taken paying customers in commercial submersibles off the coast of California, in the Gulf of Mexico, and in the Atlantic Ocean. It was in 2016 that the company transported its customers to a shipwreck for the first time, using their submersible Cyclops 1 to visit the Andrea Doria wreck site. The company acquired a submersible vessel, Antipodes, and later built two of its own: Cyclops 1 and Titan. In 2021, OceanGate began taking paying tourists in the Titan on visits to the wreck of the Titanic.

Credits : The Economic Times

Titan was the second submersible designed and built by OceanGate, with an intended maximum depth of 4,000 m (13,000 ft). It was a five-person submersible vessel, 22 feet long, 9.2 feet wide, 8.3 feet high and 10,432 kg in weight. It is the most cost-efficient and lightweight deep-sea submersible ever made. It was the first completed crewed submersible that used a hull constructed of titanium and carbon fiber composite materials, as most other human-carrying submersibles are designed with an all-metal pressure vessel. The entire pressure vessel was comprised of two titanium hemispheres, two matching titanium interface rings, and the carbon fibre wound cylinder—the largest such device ever built to be in a crewed submersible. One of the titanium hemispherical end caps was fitted with a 380 mm-diameter acrylic window. It also included a landing skid structure and outer glass fiber composite shell, both bolted to the titanium interface rings. It had a maximum payload of 685 kg and moved at up to 5.6 km/h using four electric thrusters, arrayed two horizontal and two vertical. The vessel carried oxygen sufficient for the survival of five people for a time period of 96 hours and the supply of oxygen would depend on factors like breathing rate, level of physical activity and the extent of stress experienced by those onboard. Titan was equipped with a real-time acoustic monitoring system, on which they held a patent, and claimed could detect the onset of buckling in the carbon fibre hull prior to a catastrophic failure which they couldn’t substantiate. It was controlled with a modified game controller, similar to Cyclops 1. According to the OceanGate, Titan had seven backup systems that were supposed to get the vessel to the surface in case of any failure but none of these techniques were able to prevent the catastrophe that had happened.

TITANIC EXPLORATIONS

Titan’s first tourist expedition to the Titanic was in July 2021. The company had organised a total of 13 dives to the Titanic wreckage with six in 2021 and seven in 2022. A pilot, a guide and three paying passengers were taken each time. It roughly takes eight hours for the Titan to reach the Titanic with the emission of a safety ping every 15 minutes to be monitored by the mother ship. In 2022, a reporter David Pogue was onboard the surface ship when Titan went lost and wasn’t able to locate the Titanic on which he wrote a report for CBS News questioning the safety of the trip. In another 2022 dive, the submersible started to spin in circles in its attempt to move forward near the sea bed due to the reason that one of the thrusters on the submersible was accidentally installed backwards. Also, it is known that in a 2022 dive, the submersible faced battery issues and had to be manually attached to a lifting platform which caused damage to the external components. In addition to all these, an expedition to the Titanic that departed from St. John’s, Newfoundland on 16 June 2023 ended in a tragedy. Clients have to pay US$250,000 per person for the eight-day Titanic expedition with OceanGate and also have to sign waivers that warned of the ways in which they could die. The company intended to undertake multiple expeditions to the Titanic in 2023 but couldn’t execute its plans due to poor weather. In the context of the Titan’s fate, the chances of more titanic explorations led by OceanGate are narrow. According to David Scott-Beddard, CEO of the Titanic exhibition company White Star Memories Ltd, the probability of conducting future research regarding the Titanic wreckage has diminished owing to the loss of Titan.

MAJOR LIMITATIONS OF TITAN

1) Once the hatch is closed and bolted from the outside after the passengers have entered it, it cannot be opened from the inside.

2) There is no on-board location system. The support ship which monitored the position of Titan relative to its targets sent text messages to Titan providing distances and directions.

3) The submersible was not certified or classed by a ship classification society to certify that the construction of the vessel complies with relevant standards and carry out regular surveys in service to ensure continuing compliance with the standards. It was not registered as a US vessel or with international agencies that ensure safety.

4) Titan was not equipped with an emergency locator beacon.

DENIALS OF OCEANGATE’S CLAIMS

• OceanGate claimed on its website that the Titan was "designed and engineered by OceanGate Inc. in collaboration with experts from NASA, Boeing and the University of Washington.” With the disappearance of the Titan in 2023, the University of Washington disclosed that the Applied Physics Laboratory had no involvement in “the design, engineering, or testing of the Titan submersible."

• A Boeing spokesperson also stated that Boeing "was not a partner on the Titan and did not design or build it."

• A NASA spokesperson asserted that NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center had a Space Act Agreement with OceanGate, but "did not conduct testing and manufacturing via its workforce or facilities

OceanGate on its website claimed that a real-time hull health monitoring system, fitted on the Titan’s hull can effectively examine the changes in pressure as the vessel dives deeper using acoustic sensors and strain gauges and ''accurately assess the integrity of the structure''. However, David Lochridge, who was OceanGate’s Director of Marine Operations, filed a quality control report in 2018 and felt that the real-time acoustic monitoring system would not warn the crew of any kind of potential failure with sufficient time to safely abort the mission and evacuate. Had it operated as being affirmed by the company, Titan's pilot would have been warned to return to the surface and the tragedy would have been avoided.

In addition to this, the Marine Technology Society and Rob McCallum, a leading deep-sea exploration specialist have expressed their concerns regarding the safety of the planned expedition in 2018, advising to use the submersible for commercial purposes only after testing and classifying it and warned the company that it was risking the lives of its clients.

James Cameron, director of the 1997 film “Titanic”, who has visited the wreck site 33 times, criticized the choice of the carbon-fibre composite construction of the pressure vessel as such material has no strength to withstand the level of compression due to immense pressures experienced at the sea bed. He also criticized the real-time monitoring system of the submersible’s hull as an inappropriate measure that would do little to avoid an implosion.

HOW WILL THE INVESTIGATION PROCEED?

As it is believed now if the cause of the catastrophe is a leakage in the vessel, then the critical question to be addressed would be based on the quality of testing of the Titan’s capability. It is not clear whether the vessel was tested to identify any kind of cracks in its body, especially its hull which is known to be compressed by immense water in each dive. The regular stress undergone by the submersible would have caused weakening and also have caused microscopic damages to it. While most merchant vessels are required to be certified by external bodies that inspect whether certain standards are met to ensure quality and safety, Titan was not a certified submersible. The company’s explanation for not having the vessel certified was that it was an experimental vessel and so innovative that the existing assessment techniques to evaluate it would be inappropriate. However, Prof David Andrews of University College London says that it would have been fine if the submersibles are exploratory crafts for deep sea research but as the firm is earning money by taking passengers, not having an appropriate quality certification is a serious issue.

To know the specific reason behind the misfortune and to see what measures could have prevented it, every piece of the debris that has been discovered would be thoroughly examined. For this, the structure of the carbon fibre pieces will be closely analysed under a microscope, concentrating the direction of the carbon fibre filaments, seeking for tears which would help in identifying the specific place where the rupture has happened. Since there was no black box, it is almost impossible to track the last moments of the Titan. The investigation will focus on the site of the rupture to gather more parts of the vessel. But it will be really hard considering the fact that it is being assembled by remotely operated vehicles in the darkness of the deep sea and as the remains are in smaller sizes. The presumed human remains will undergo a formal analysis by US medical professionals. For extensive testing and analysis, the evidence will be taken to the US port by the Marine Board of Investigation. It is said that the evidence will be shared at a future public hearing, the date for which is yet to be revealed.

There is a lack of clarity about which agency will lead this investigation as incidents like this which involve a submersible has no particular protocol. This case is particularly complex as it took place in international waters with people from different nationalities involved. As of now, the US coast guard is an important player in the investigation. However, the death waiver signed by the travellers onboard which clearly stated the different ways in which they could die during the dive is supposed to be a great hurdle in lawsuits.

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BY : NANDHANA TJ

nandhana342002@gmail.com