On Wednesday morning, the Horizon Arctic entered St. John’s harbor in Newfoundland and Labrador. It was carrying the wreckage of the lost Titan submersible, which held the world’s attention for days on end.
The Titan, which disappeared on Sunday, June 18, was on its way to explore the wreck of the Titanic. The ill-fated Titanic sank 111 years ago, nearly 1,000 miles off the coast of Cape Cod, Massachusetts. Those onboard the Titan submersible paid upwards of $250,000 to attempt to dive to 12,500 feet and have an up-close-and-personal look at the most famous shipwreck in the world.
The 21-foot Titan began its dive at 9 a.m. ADT, but within two hours, it lost contact with its mothership. Submersibles, unlike submarines, require a mothership to operate properly. The crew on the mothership is responsible for sealing the Titan submersible with a series of bolts, effectively locking the tourists inside. The Titan also needed the mothership for launch and retrieval, and since GPS doesn’t work underwater, it was guided via text message from above. The final contact from Titan came at 11:47 a.m.
When the Titan failed to resurface at its scheduled time of 6 p.m., the crew on the mothership alerted authorities and the hunt was on. The Titan had four days of emergency air, which gave hopeful rescuers a timeline to work with. For the next 96 hours, international teams searched the vast area the sub went missing in, but weren’t able to find a thing. There were a series of curious knocking sounds that buoyed spirits temporarily, but those hopes were dashed when the clock ran out.
On Thursday, June 22, OceanGate (the company that operated the Titan) released a statement. “We now believe,” it read, “that our CEO Stockton Rush, Shahzada Dawood and his son Suleman Dawood, Hamish Harding, and Paul-Henri Nargeolet, have sadly been lost.”
Soon after, it was discovered that the Titan — mercifully, considering the options — had imploded under the pressure. It was built partially from carbon fiber and titanium, a fact which came under heavy scrutiny. To add to it, when the news broke that it was controlled via a cheap video game controller, many began questioning the intelligence of building a submersible from a material hat has not been tested over time in such extreme depths.
“I’d like to be remembered as an innovator,” OceanGate CEO Stockton Rush told vlogger Alan Estrada in 2021. “I’ve broken some rules to make this. I think I’ve broken them with logic and good engineering behind me. The carbon fiber and titanium, there’s a rule you don’t do that. Well, I did.”
The implosion likely happened too fast for the crew onboard the Titan to know it happened. Now, the remains of the sub have been raised to the surface. “It’s just a very eerie feeling here this morning,” said Sarah Glenning, a bystander in St. John’s harbor on the morning the wreckage was craned onto land, “knowing that people were on that, and that’s all that’s left. Those are people’s sons and fathers and relatives. It’s just unfortunate.”
The recovery consisted of the Titan’s nose cone, pieces of its hull, and a section of the tail. They were offloaded onto the Canadian Coast Guard dock in St. John’s. In the coming days, what’s left of the Titan will be handed to investigators, who will attempt to figure out exactly what led to the tragic implosion.
“Just like an airline crash, they may try to reassemble the sub to put the parts together like a puzzle to determine where the failure point was,” Tom Maddox, founder and CEO of Underwater Forensic Investigations, told the CBC. “In the case of a massive implosion that’s not going to be an easy task because much of the craft would have disintegrated.”
While it seems unlikely, it’s still possible that the bodies of those aboard the Titan can be recovered. “I think it would be unwise to rule out the possibility that they could recover recognizable bodies,” Maddox continued. “I think it’s possible. Everything depends on the exact second [the Titan imploded], the way things happened.”
