Race Against Time to Find the Titan Submersible

The Titan submersible disappears while seeking the Titanic.

By JOHN LEAKE

The Titans were the first race of Greek gods that ruled before the rise of Zeus and his fellow Olympians. Zeus rebelled against his father, the Titan Cronus, and then waged war against his father’s entire race. Ultimately Zeus and his siblings prevailed and imprisoned the Titans in a deep chasm in the Underworld called Tartarus.

The poet Hesiod described Tartarus as a chasm so deep that an anvil dropped from the earth would take nine days to fall to Hades (the underworld), and then another nine to fall to Tartarus.

The RMS Titanic was the second of three Olympic-class ocean liners. At the time of its maiden voyage, it was the largest ship afloat. With its multiple bulkheads and watertight compartments that could each seal off in an emergency, it was billed as an unsinkable ship.

The Titanic embarked from Southhampton, England on April 10, 1912. Just over four days later, on April 14 at 11:40 pm (ship's time), she struck an iceberg and sank 2 hours and 40 minutes later. Several of the era’s wealthiest men and women were on board for the maiden voyage, and many—including John Jacob Astor IV and his pregnant wife— went down with the ship. Harvard graduates are indebted to Titanic casualty Harry Elkins Widener—a young bibliophile whose mother built the college’s splendid Widener Library in his memory.

The Titanic sank about 350 miles southeast of Newfoundland and 900 miles east of Cape Cod, in 12,500 feet of water—or 2.367 miles below sea level. At that depth, the water exerts a pressure of 40 Megapascal or 5801 pounds per square inch.

On Sunday, June 18, 2023, the submersible Titan—containing OceanGate Expeditions CEO, Stockton Rush, British billionaire Hamish Harding, French dive expert Paul Henry Nargeolet, Pakistani businessman Shahzada Dawood and his son, Suleman—began its two-hour descent to the wreck of the Titanic.

However, apparently just before it reached the Titanic, the Titan lost contact with its support ship, the Polar Prince.

Because radio waves do not travel well through good electrical conductors like salt water, submerged submarines cannot communicate with the surface using radio signals. Since the advent of submarines, this has posed a formidable challenge. Nevertheless, sound waves travel very well under water.

The Titan reportedly uses two systems to communicate with its surface ship. Text messages (perhaps employing some sort of acoustic sound technology) can be sent back and forth, and safety pings are emitted every 15 minutes to indicate the sub’s location and that it is still functioning. Both systems apparently stopped working about an hour and 45 minutes after the Titan submerged on Sunday morning. This suggests that something happened to the Titan around the time it was expected to reach the Titanic, which raises concerns of a collision with or entanglement in the wreck.

Former ABC News science editor Michael Guillen was the first journalist to visit the Titanic wreck site in 2000, and he had a harrowing experience when a strong current pushed his vessel towards the Titanic’s 21-ton propellers and then wedged it under the great ship’s stern. The submersible’s crew tried to reverse out, and ultimately succeeded in freeing itself after 30 minutes of maneuvering back and forth.

We hope that the Titan will also ultimately succeed in making its way back to the surface or will be found by a Coast Guard or Naval vessel before its crew runs out of oxygen. As of this (Tuesday afternoon), they had (according to U.S. Coast Guard officials) 40 hours left.