Five people died due to submersible explosion

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A submarine searching for the wreckage of the RMS Titanic suffered a “fierce explosion”, killing all five people on board, the US Coast Guard has said.

On Thursday morning, an international search effort found debris near the Titanic’s location on the ocean floor. Officials later confirmed that the wreckage contained the remains of the submersible, known as the Titan.

“This is an incredibly unforgiving environment on the ocean floor and the debris is consistent with a catastrophic explosion of a ship,” Rear Admiral John Mauger of the US Coast Guard said at a press briefing.

The discovery of Titan’s remains has ended a frantic four-day search to locate the ship, after it lost contact with its surface ship, HMS Polar Prince, on Sunday morning.

The ship’s operator Oceangate confirmed that five people on board – its chief executive Stockton Rush, Pakistani businessman Prince Dawood and his son Sulaiman Dawood, British businessman Hamish Harding and Paul-Henri Nargiolet, a French explorer – were presumed dead.

“Now we believe (them). , , Tragically, they have been lost,” the company said in a statement. “These men were true explorers with a distinctive spirit of adventure and a deep passion for exploring and protecting the world’s oceans.”

A remotely operated vehicle launched from the Horizon Arctic ship as part of the search operation detected the Titanic’s nose cone on Thursday morning, located approximately 1,600 feet from the Titanic’s bow.

The ROV later found a large debris field containing the forward end of the ship’s pressure hull. The aft end of the hull was later discovered in another small debris field.

Search and rescue teams were in a race against time to track down the Titan within 96 hours of its launch—the time period when the crew would still have had oxygen if the ship had remained intact.

A glimmer of hope appeared for the search effort on Wednesday after patrol planes detected an underwater noise, prompting rescuers to refocus their search efforts. But the Coast Guard said Thursday that there does not appear to be a connection between the wreckage’s location and the sounds.

Mauger said the tragedy could have happened before the rescue effort could begin because sonar surveillance of the area revealed no signs of an explosion during the search.

“We know that as we have been conducting this search during and after the last 72 hours, we have received sonar buoys almost continuously in the water and no catastrophic events have been detected while those sonar buoys were in the water. It’s gone, Mauger said on Thursday.

According to Carl Hartsfield of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, who assisted with the search, the location of the wreckage suggests that there was no collision with the wreckage of the liner.

The search operation will continue in the coming days to locate the wreckage on the ocean floor using an ROV to determine the chronology of events. The investigation of this tragedy is also expected to be announced.

“This was an incredibly complex case and we are still working to develop the details of the timeline associated with this accident and response,” Mauger said.

“We will continue to investigate the wreckage area and I know there are many questions about why and when this happened,” he added. “These are questions about which we will now gather as much information as possible while governments are meeting and discussing what an investigation into an accident of this nature might look like.”