The doomed Titanic sub would have imploded and killed its crew so fast that the five people aboard “never knew it happened,” an expert in submersibles told The Post.
Debris from the OceanGate Expeditions Titan submersible was found Thursday, confirming that all those aboard had perished.
The Coast Guard said the array of debris on the ocean floor, found 1,600 feet from the bow of the Titanic, meant the craft would have suffered a “catastrophic implosion” sometime after it had been lost one hour and 45 minutes into its dive to the wreck, 12,500 feet below the surface on Sunday.
By the time communication was lost, the vessel would have been just shy of 10,000 feet below the surface, experts told The Post, at which point the enormous water pressure would mean any tiny weakness, crack or fissure in the submersible’s hull would cause it to instantly implode.
Expert Ofer Ketter said the implosion would occur within a millisecond, if not a nanosecond, if something breached the hull of the vessel to cause a loss in pressure.
“They never knew it happened,” he said of the five victims. “Which is actually very positive in this very negative situation.”
“It was instantaneous — before even their brain could even send a type of message to their body that they’re having pain,” Ketter, co-founder of a private submersible company called Sub-Merge, told The Post from Costa Rica.
The bodies of the sub’s five explorers — Sulaiman Dawood, 19; his business tycoon father, Shahzada, 48; British billionaire Hamish Harding, 58; famed Titanic explorer Paul-Henri Nargeolet, 77; and OceanGate founder and CEO Stockton Rush, 61 — are unlikely to be recovered.
With the spread of the debris found on the ocean floor, experts agree the sub most likely imploded during its descent to the wreck on Sunday, around the time or shortly after it lost contact with the surface.
The pressure that far under the water’s surface is around 6,000 pounds per square inch, which the carbon fiber and titanium exterior of the Titan was designed to withstand.
Dr. Peter Girguis, oceanographer and Harvard University professor, compared the submersible to a scuba tank.
“When a scuba tank is overfilled,” he told The Post, “there’s a safety device that releases gas very quickly. At least that’s the plan.”
“When you take the equivalent of a scuba tank and you want it to hold the pressure out, it’s a different story — because if you go beyond the strength of the vessel, then it crushes or collapses.”
Regarding the implosion itself, he added: “We tend to believe they [are] swift and they tend to be complete, but I want to emphasize again, we don’t exactly know.”
Any defect or leak from either the inside or outside of the vessel would result in an implosion — the opposite of an explosion, where the pressure surrounding an object pushes into it.
Girguis, also an adjunct oceanographer in applied ocean engineering and physics at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, said submersibles and other such vessels or devices are subjected to pressure tests and often require safety factors to ensure the equipment can withstand more than what it will likely face.
“So if you’re doing work at a given depth, you have to design it so it can withstand at least 1.5 or two times depending on the nation, the policy, etc,” Giguis said. “We build in those safety factors, then we test it … often up to 10 times.”
Ketter agreed and noted submersibles are expected to be built, tested, and pressurized to withstand pressure at depths greater than what they will likely reach.
Doing so prevents instances that Ketter compared to trying “to take a hot air balloon to the moon.”
“It’s not going to work.”
The Marine Technology Society sent a letter to Rush in 2018 warning the OceanGate head of the critical importance that its prototypes undergo proper third-party testing before being taken to such depths to ensure the safety of its passengers.
But Rush allegedly refused to do so.
The investigation into what caused the sub to implode is ongoing, and at this stage, there is no evidence pointing to an error on the part of the OceanGate, and it is also possible that due to the nature of the accident, a conclusion may never be reached.
Ketter said implosions “shouldn’t happen because we know how to build submersibles for them not to implode.
“So, when do implosions happen? To be honest and to be frank, when the engineering is wrong in its calculations.
“When either the structure, the material, the testing, the seals — any other part of the submersible that was designed to go to that depth — was designed wrong and didn’t withstand the pressures that it was designed to.”
Ketter also said it would have been “extremely rare” for a crash to have caused a puncture and led to the implosion.
The submersible disappeared just an hour and 45 minutes into its Titanic exploration off the coast of Newfoundland on Sunday with air reserves of 96 hours.
Reports of recurring “underwater noises” characterized as both “banging” and “tapping” spurred hope Wednesday, but have since been deemed unrelated to the missing crew.
Searchers had been scouring waters up to two and a half miles deep, spanning an area twice as large as Connecticut.
The Coast Guard called in ships, airplanes and other equipment — such as undersea technology to scan for additional noises — to aid in the mission.
Two remotely operated vessels, including the Victor 6000, were deployed early Thursday and soon returned results in the discovery of the debris fields.
The five explorers were sealed into the sub by 17 bolts, which could only have been opened from the outside.
“Today is a pretty solemn moment as we reflect on the loss of five people in this submersible,” Girguis concluded. “And it’s given a lot of us pause about how we approach ocean exploration.”
