Missing Titanic Submersible: ‘We Need to Have Hope’: More Ships Join Search (Published 2023) (2024)

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Here’s the latest on the missing submersible.

More rescue vessels have arrived in the vast search area — roughly twice the size of Connecticut and more than two miles deep — where teams of international experts have been conducting an extensive search for the craft, called the Titan. The 22-foot submersible lost contact on Sunday during what should have been a two-and-a half-hour journey to the wreck of the Titanic.

Here are the latest details:

• Captain Frederick reiterated that the mission continues to be a search-and-rescue operation, although officials have said they are operating under the assumption that the submersible would run out of oxygen sometime Thursday morning. “We need to have hope,” he said. Here’s a look at the craft’s limited air supply.

• Rolling Stone magazine reported that a Canadian search plane had detected “banging sounds” in 30-minute intervals within the search area. The report, based on internal communications from the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, could not be independently verified. Here’s what could be making the noises.

• One of the ships heading to the search area is carrying a French-operated robot capable of operating at the depth where the Titanic sits. It is not expected to reach the scene until Wednesday evening. Here’s a closer look at some of the search vessels.

• Leaders in the submersible craft industry had warned for years of possible “catastrophic” problems with the vehicle’s design. They also worried that OceanGate Expeditions, the Titan’s owner, had not followed standard certification procedures. Read our reporting on the company.

• Stockton Rush, the chief executive of OceanGate, was piloting the submersible, according to the company. The other four passengers are Hamish Harding, a British businessman and explorer; a British-Pakistani businessman, Shahzada Dawood, and his teenage son, Suleman; and Paul-Henri Nargeolet, a French maritime expert who has been on more than 35 dives to the Titanic wreck site.

For a survivor of the deepest underwater rescue, the Titan search feels urgent and personal.

On Aug. 29, 1973, Mr. Mallinson, then 35, and Roger Chapman, 28, were in a six-foot wide deep-sea submersible called the Pisces III, conducting a routine dive to the seabed for work on a trans-Atlantic phone cable, about 150 miles off the coast of Ireland.

As they were preparing to get towed back to their mother ship, a hatch accidentally opened, causing the aft sphere, a self-contained portion of the vessel, to flood. The extra water added weight to the submersible and sent it plunging 1,575 feet underwater.

Mr. Mallinson told the BBC in 2013 that as the submersible plummeted, the two men “got cushions and curled ourselves up to try and prevent injuries” from the looming impact with the seabed. “We managed to find some white cloth to put in our mouths so we didn’t bite our tongues off too.” He added: “It was about 30 seconds until we hit.”

With a single sandwich, a can of lemonade and a limited supply of oxygen to survive on, the two men were stuck. They did their best to preserve oxygen, which meant not speaking or moving. They would squeeze the other’s hand to let each other know they were OK.

Rescuers soon began an international effort to bring the men back up, with the United States, Canada and the United Kingdom sending in teams. Two vessels that had been called to assist with the recovery failed to bring Pisces III up the surface.

Finally, after more than 80 hours, the men were rescued by a U.S. Navy submersible, the CURV-III, which was able to attach a rope to pull the Pisces III to the surface. They made it out with only 12 minutes of oxygen to spare, Mr. Mallinson said.

Though Mr. Mallinson is following the race to find the Titan submersible, he said in a phone call on Wednesday that he hadn’t had much time to keep up with the news because people kept calling him for interviews.

But he emphasized that a quick response by rescuers was essential to survival in these types of situations.

“If you need rescuing, you need rescuing now,” Mr. Mallinson said. “Not in another three days.”

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Three decades ago, a reporter took a plunge into wonder, and danger.

As a journalist fascinated by the technological feats of a new generation of small submarines, actually diving in one helped me understand a number of things: the scientific importance of such dives, why humans can often accomplish more in the deep sea than robots and why people are eager to engage in such dangerous pursuits. My experience also illuminates the risks that the passengers of the Titan submersible ran when they decided to dive on the resting place of the Titanic.

Our own target was a gnarled field of lava from a recent volcanic eruption that icy seawater had turned into a frozen lake of eruptive fury. The scientists on the expedition, led by John R. Delaney, a geologist from the University of Washington, expected to find the field dotted with hot plumes of mineral-rich water that produced towering chimneys of rock and fed strange forms of life, including thickets of tube worms. But so far they had struck out because of poor weather and equipment difficulties.

“May the force be with you,” a dive controller aboard the submersible’s mother ship said over the hydrophone as we began our descent. For me, Dr. Delaney and our pilot, Robert J. Grieve, this dive was a chance to help the expedition end on an upbeat note. Each of us looked out our own observation port and had responsibilities for telling each other what we could see in the undersea gloom.

If cramped, Alvin’s passenger sphere was surprisingly comfortable; it was lined with soft cushions and felt a bit like a compact spaceship. There were dials and switches galore for backup systems. Everything spoke of careful planning. Outside my observation port, I saw an endless parade of rippling, bioluminescent organisms.

We reached bottom around 9:30 a.m. and proceeded to fly over endless fields of pillow-shaped lava. After an hour of fruitless searching, we came upon our first big discovery — a Reebok shoe that had sunk into the abyss, a jarring observation given the gravity of our hunt.

Slowly our tiny sphere grew colder. I put on a sweater.

When the lights went out, my experienced companions insisted it was nothing to worry about. Our pilot soon had us moving again, on backup power.

Then, at 11:30 a.m., after what seemed like many hours of viewing endless mounds of lava, we came upon a giant chimney looming up out of the dark.

“It’s hot,” reported our pilot, Mr. Grieve. “It’s got tube worms all over it.”

A riot of life flourished on the unworldly monolith, which stood three or four stories high: four-to-five-inch tube worms, mats of white bacteria and iridescent, dark-red palm worms about an inch long. There were also swarms of miniature lobsters and at least two types of small corals.

We examined five large chimneys in all. Some of the small ones were actively venting hot water but were naked of life and quickly crumbled when Alvin’s mechanical arm tried to grab them. The hottest vent-water we measured was 543 degrees Fahrenheit, hot enough to cook pizza and melt many modern materials, including tin.

We had to remain perfectly still when Mr. Grieve used the sub’s robotic arm to take samples and measurements. At one point, I started doing breathing exercises to relax.

Suddenly, Mr. Grieve noticed that the temperature of the submarine’s skin was starting to rise. By accident, we had positioned ourselves over a hot vent, a potentially dangerous thing to do because the sub’s plastic windows could melt.

We quickly began our ascent, exhausted and happy.

I couldn’t imagine a robot doing what Dr. Delaney and Mr. Grieve had accomplished on our dive into the sunless depths. The two specialists performed a complicated dance of dexterous maneuvers based on close observations they made of the alien world around us. They also made snap decisions in the moment, moving away quickly from a serious threat.

On the way up, I watched the flashes of living light and wondered what else was out there.

The submersible pilot’s spouse is descended from a famous couple who died on the Titanic.

Ms. Rush, born Wendy Hollings Weil, married Stockton Rush in 1986, according to a New York Times wedding announcement. Her LinkedIn page says that she has participated in three OceanGate expeditions to the Titanic wreckage in the last two years; that she serves as the company’s communications director; and that she is a longtime board member of the company’s charitable foundation.

Ms. Rush could not immediately be reached for comment for this item.

Ms. Rush’s ancestors on the Titanic are perhaps best known for their tragic love story. Survivors of the disaster recalled seeing Isidor Straus refuse a seat on a lifeboat when women and children were still waiting to flee the sinking liner. Ida Straus, his wife of four decades, declared that she would not leave her husband, and the two were seen standing arm in arm on the Titanic’s deck as the ship went down.

A fictionalized version of the Strauses’ story was immortalized in pop culture by the director James Cameron, whose 1997 film about the disaster features a poignant shot of an older couple embracing in bed as the waters rise around their cabin.

Ms. Rush is descended from one of the Strauses’ daughters, Minnie, who married Dr. Richard Weil in 1905. Their son, Richard Weil Jr., later served as president of Macy’s New York, and his son, Dr. Richard Weil III, is Ms. Rush’s father, according to Joan Adler, the executive director of the Straus Historical Society.

Isidor Straus’s body was found at sea roughly two weeks after the Titanic sank, New York Times archives show. Ida Straus’s remains have never been recovered.

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What is making banging sounds underwater? Searchers can’t tell yet.

The sounds were detected by a sonobuoy, a floating device equipped with hydrophones to record noise underwater, and they seemed to be occurring at 30-minute intervals, according to a report in Rolling Stone. That raised the possibility that someone inside the vessel was making an “improvised signal for locating the vehicle by banging on the metallic part of the hull from the inside,” according to Jeff Eggers, a retired Navy commander with experience piloting compact submersibles.

“There’s lots of things in the ocean that will make noise and be heard on a sonobuoy, but there are few things that will sound like regular banging on metal,” Mr. Eggers said.

Limited information has been released to the public about the clanging sounds, making it difficult for outsiders to surmise what could be causing them.

What the sounds might signify “largely depends on what frequency, what rhythm, and what pattern” the sounds have, said Simone Baumann-Pickering, an acoustic ecologist at the University of California San Diego. Lower-frequency noises might be made by whales, for example, while higher-frequency whistles or echolocation clicks could come from dolphins.

The regularity of the sounds also matters, she said, because natural noise sources like animals or seismic and volcanic activity tend to generate sounds that are more variable than artificial sounds would be.

“I think it would be pretty straightforward to determine whether something is an Earth signal or a biological signal or a machine signal,” Dr. Baumann-Pickering said.

Search and rescue teams operating the aircraft that deploy the sonobuoys are expert in distinguishing faint sound signatures of submarines from other underwater noise sources, Mr. Eggers said. But to track down the precise origin of the banging sounds, he said, the teams will need to expand monitoring in the area with more sonobuoys. “Every bit of data and positional information helps,” he said.

Mr. Hartsfield, a laboratory director at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute, spoke about the challenges.

“From my experience with acoustics, there are sounds by biologics that sound man-made to the untrained ear,” he said. “But I can assure you that the people listening to these tapes are trained.”

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Dwindling oxygen may now be the biggest threat facing those aboard the Titan.

There is no way to say any more precisely how much may be left.

Assuming the vessel is still intact underwater, several variables could help extend the survival time for the five people aboard, according to Dr. David Cornfield, a pulmonologist at Stanford University.

If they can remain calm and breathe less deeply and frequently, they might eke out several more hours. “They can very modestly change the curve,” Dr. Cornfield said. For instance, if they could slow their breathing enough to gain 10 percent more time, that would add nine hours of survival to the possible window for rescue.

The level of carbon dioxide, an invisible gas that is exhaled when breathing, also affects survival time. If carbon dioxide builds up too high, the people on board may grow sleepy, fall unconscious and eventually die. The Titan is said to be equipped with a scrubber, or filter, that is meant to extract excess carbon dioxide from air in the enclosed craft.

The submersible is a tight fit for a pilot and four crew members: 22 feet long, 9.2 feet wide and 8.3 feet high. Its small size is intended to allow undersea expeditions at relatively low cost, but experts have warned of structural risks and other concerns about the craft’s reliability. David Pogue, a CBS reporter and former New York Times technology columnist who has been aboard the Titan, described the interior as “about the size of a minivan.”

Images from OceanGate Expeditions, the company that operates Titan, show an interior resembling a metal tube. Passengers sit against the curved walls; there are no chairs for them, and little room to stand or move around.

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Carl Hartsfield of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution said at the news conference that it’s possible that undersea animals could make noises that sound human-made, but that top experts are analyzing them to make that determination.

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Captain Frederick said the Coast Guard has received “incredible support,” with aerial assets provided by several agencies. Aircraft will continue to fly over today over the search area, which is now twice the size of Connecticut, he said.

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Shahzada and Suleman Dawood, father-son passengers, love science fiction and travel.

“Traveling, science, are part of his DNA,” said Ahsen Uddin Syed, a friend of Mr. Dawood who used to work with him at the Engro Corporation, a business conglomerate where Mr. Dawood is the vice chairman.

Mr. Syed said that Mr. Dawood loves Star Trek and Star Wars, and is also fond of nature, often traveling to faraway places and sharing pictures of his adventures.

“He is an explorer,” Mr. Syed said.

Like his father, Suleman Dawood also loves science fiction, according to a statement from Engro. He also plays volleyball and takes a keen interest in solving Rubik’s Cubes.

On Thursday, the University of Strathclyde in Glasgow confirmed that Suleman was a business student there and had just completed his first year.

The elder Dawood’s Instagram profile is blanketed with high-definition pictures of birds, flowers and landscapes, ranging from Greenland’s ice sheet to penguins in the Shetlands to a tiny bird in London with the caption “Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy.”

“Don’t adventures ever have an end?” Mr. Dawood wrote in a Facebook post last year from a trip in Iceland, quoting Bilbo Baggins from “The Fellowship of the Ring.” “I suppose not. Someone else always has to carry on the story.”

Khalid Mansoor, another former colleague of Mr. Dawood, said that when the two worked together, Mr. Dawood was a passionate champion for the environment. He is also a trustee at the SETI Institute, an organization that is devoted to the search for extraterrestrial intelligence.

“The situation is extremely serious,” the institute wrote in a statement on Tuesday. “We are holding out every hope for a successful rescue mission and the safe return of our brother and all those on board.”

The Dawood family declined to comment as some of them traveled to Canada, the staging site for the search, a spokeswoman for Engro said.

Shahzada Dawood and his wife, Christine, who live in Britain, also have a daughter, Alina.

“May Shahzada and Suleman return to us safe and sound,” Mr. Dawood’s sister, Sabrina Dawood, wrote in a Facebook message.

Salman Masood contributed reporting.

Any rescue may depend on passengers staying calm, a two-time Titan diver says.

Mr. Fanning said Stockton Rush, the chief executive of OceanGate, and Paul-Henri Nargeolet, a maritime expert and former commander in the French Navy, would be well aware of ways to conserve oxygen and would be making use of the vessel's blankets and scrubbers, which absorb carbon dioxide from the air.

“A lot depends on the people down there,” said Mr. Fanning. “Are they breathing heavily? I don’t see a lot of panic from the people down there, certainly not those two,” he said, referring to Mr. Rush and Mr. Nargeolet, each of whom took part in dives aboard the Titan with him last summer.

Both men, he said, would know that it would take several days for a rescue vessel to arrive.

Mr. Fanning said he was well aware of the expedition’s risks before his dives, including that the vessel had not undergone independent certification procedures. But the prospect of seeing the wreckage of the Titanic up close was worth it, he said.

“Everybody knew the risks, but of course, everyone is more excited about getting to the Titanic than overly worrying,” said Mr. Fanning, 65, who had grown up hearing stories about the Titanic from his father, who was born in Belfast, Northern Ireland, where the Titanic was built.

Mr. Fanning, the chief executive of San Leon Energy, an oil and gas company, said the experience was thrilling and well worth the $120,000 he paid for the dives, one that toured an area near the wreckage and another that visited the Titanic itself. “You see a lot, a bathtub in one of the rooms, a lamp outside the Sergeant of Arms rooms,” he said.

“It is not comfortable, you’re in a cigar-like tube, and you’re just sitting on the floor,” taking turns looking out of a small porthole, he said.

Mr. Fanning, who lives in London and Dubai, said he was still very hopeful of a successful rescue, but acknowledged the difficulties facing the search operation. Even if the submersible was floating near the surface, semi-submerged, it would be extremely difficult to spot, he said.

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At least eight more ships are joining the search for the Titan.

“It’s a good combination,” Matthew Heaslip, a senior lecturer in naval history at the University of Portsmouth in England, said on Wednesday. “A mix of vessels that would be very much intended for this kind of rescue.”

The new ships will join the Polar Prince, which deployed the Titan submersible on Sunday, and Deep Energy, a pipe-laying vessel flagged in the Bahamas, as well as three other Canadian vessels.

Experts say there are very few vessels in the world that can help with such a challenging operation that is searching above and below the water. Crews have so far combed an area of 10,000 square miles, roughly the size of Massachusetts, and the submersible is thought to have about one day of oxygen remaining.

Asked whether there was any equipment in the world capable of lifting the submersible out of the water if it is found at a considerable depth, Mr. Heaslip said it depended on the vessel’s location and its condition.

“If it is on a shallow depth and it simply lost power, that would be a slightly easier equation,” he said. “If it’s gone all the way down to the wreck, there are capabilities for that, but it’s going to get very, very challenging.”

Here’s a list of the vessels, and what we know about them.

• Canadian C.G.S. John Cabot: Classified as an offshore fishery science vessel, this ship has sonar capabilities. It arrived at the search area on Wednesday.

• Canadian C.G.S. Ann Harvey: This ship is classified as a high-endurance multitasked vessel and carries a large trove of communication and navigational equipment.

• Canadian C.G.S. Terry Fox: The vessel is classified as a heavy icebreaker.

• Canadian C.G.S. Atlantic Merlin: This ship is an offshore tug and supply vessel. It carries a remotely operated vehicle and arrived on site on Wednesday.

• Motor Vessel Horizon Arctic: This ship was designed for advanced offshore support operations around the world.

• A commercial vessel, the Skandi Vinland: This ship serves multiple purposes and carries two heavy-duty remotely operated vehicles. It arrived on site on Wednesday.

• A French research vessel, the Atalante: The ship is equipped with an exploration robot that can reach the depths of the Titanic’s shipwreck. It is expected to arrive in the search area on Wednesday evening.

• His Majesty’s Canadian Ship Glace Bay: This warship performs many roles, including search and rescue duties. It also features a mobile decompression chamber and supports medical personnel.

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Mauger said the large amount of metal and other objects in and around the Titanic wreck was complicating the effort to determine the source of the noise.

Fanning, the chief executive of San Leon Energy, an oil and gas company, said that on one of his expeditions, the Titan landed on the sea floor about 400 feet from the Titanic. But with stronger currents, the vessel had the potential to land more than half a mile away from the site. From there, it would take an hour to get to the wreckage, he said. “You don’t have control, this thing isn’t motorized,” he said.

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A French vessel equipped with a robot capable of deep-sea dives is en route to the search site.

An Ifremer team has also left France for Canada and is expected to join the Atalante to operate the robot, called “Victor 6000,” which can dive to over 13,000 feet, Mr. Berville said.

The robot has been in service since 1999 and is used for scientific and oceanographic work, according to Ifremer’s website. Scientific teams control the robot from the ship, to which it is connected by a long cable.

It can also study areas that require video and acoustic inspection and manipulate objects, they said, with no limit to the duration of a dive, as long as pilots operate a rotating watch system.

The order to change the Atalante’s course came at the request ofPresident Emmanuel Macron of France, after the American authorities had asked for assistance, Mr. Berville said.

“The French authorities and relevant ministries are closely following the situation,” Mr. Berville said.

Ifremer, a publiclyfunded institute that operates France’s oceanographic fleet, had worked on previous Titanic dives, including with Paul-Henri Nargeolet, a French maritime expert who is one of the five passengers aboard the missing vessel.

The institute said in a statement that it had been contacted on Monday by the U.S. Navy and the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution to provide support in the search for the missing submersible, known as Titan.

The Atalante, then on a mission for the French Navy’s hydrographic and oceanographic service, was quickly diverted to the search area, the statement said, adding that they were “doing their best” to find the missing vessel.

Emma Bubola contributed reporting.

A Canadian plane searching for the Titan ‘detected underwater noises,’ the U.S. Coast Guard says.

The Coast Guard said the Canadian aircraft was a P-3 surveillance plane, a model that is used for maritime patrol and support operations around the world. Data from the aircraft has been shared with the U.S. Navy for further analysis, it said.

The Coast Guard, the Department of Homeland Security and the Canadian military did not immediately respond to requests for comment. News of underwater noises in the search area was reported earlier by Rolling Stone magazine and CNN.

An international team of rescuers has been looking for the Titan in area of water larger than Connecticut. Aircraft from the United States and Canada have been scanning the surface, and sonar buoys have been deployed in the water. The Titan was thought to have less than a day of oxygen remaining as of Wednesday.

On Tuesday, the president of the Explorers Club, a New York-based organization, sent club members a letter that said sonar in the search area had “detected potential ‘tapping sounds’ implying that the crew may be alive and signaling” at 2 a.m. local time. The club’s president, Richard Garriott de Cayeux, did not elaborate.

In a statement posted to Twitter later on Tuesday, he said that “likely signs of life have been detected at the site.” He added that the club was working for approval to deploy a remote-operated vehicle in the search area that was capable of descending to depths of 6,000 meters, or nearly 20,000 feet.

Trevor Hale, a spokesman for the club, declined to comment on the record in a brief phone interview early Wednesday morning. One of the five people aboard the Titan, the British explorer Hamish Harding, is a board member of the club.