The submersible Titan imploded instantly en route to the wreck of the Titanic, which lies at a depth of 3800 meters. The five people on board were pronounced dead. Disappeared since Sunday, the searches for the Titan had continued even after the 96 hours of oxygen autonomy. Until yesterday, when a Boston Coast Guard official made the tragedy official. We asked the Captain of the vessel for technical clarifications Daniel Ruggeri Head of Research and Development Office at the Submarine Department of the Italian Navy.
Commander, how could the Titan have lost contact with the mothership it departed from?
The causes can be many. In the submarine environment, due to the particular physical laws that distinguish it, even the simple ability to communicate cannot be taken for granted. The loss of contact could therefore be attributed, at least initially, to a simple problem with the underwater communication system. As the hours wore on, however, it became clear that the situation was more complex. The discovery of the wreckage of the Titan on the seabed leads to hypothesize a structural failure of the hull of the submarine. Such a situation occurs when a submarine reaches a deeper depth than it was designed for or due to a technical problem. Considering that the objective of the mission was to reach the seabed, where it had actually been used for other missions in the past, we can exclude the first hypothesis. At this point, all that remains is to hypothesize a structural problem with the hull which led to its collapse.
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How does a submarine like the Titan work in general?
I’m not aware of the construction details of this specific vehicle. A submarine of this type, in any case, must be specifically designed to operate at very high depths. This entails the need for a hull capable of withstanding very high pressures. At a depth of 3,000 metres, the pressure is equal to 300 kg per square centimetre, to give you an idea it is like having 4 adults on the tip of a fingertip. This means that the entire hull has to withstand enormous pressure and, more importantly, be able to do it repeatedly. Furthermore, overall, operating underwater requires particular safety precautions and systems back-up to prevent a single problem from becoming fatal for the vessel and its crew. In fact, there can be no room for error, since problems even trivial in another context, aboard a submarine can have disastrous consequences. Much attention is paid in particular to safety systems and to those which allow us to maintain livable conditions on board. In the case of the Titan we have all heard of the 96 hours of time available to save the crew. The submarine therefore had to be equipped with batteries capable of supplying enough energy, precisely for the 96 hours indicated, to the on-board emergency systems. In this specific case, the main needs were to absorb carbon dioxide and introduce oxygen into the internal atmosphere, as well as maintain a normal temperature, considering that the external temperature in the ocean depths is around 4 degrees Celsius.
In your experience, why weren’t the rescue vehicles able to track him down and rescue the passengers?
The Titan is a very small submarine that operated thousands of meters under the sea. Underwater searches are mainly based on equipment that uses sound to locate an object. Underwater light propagates for a few meters, therefore a normal video camera is totally ineffective, the same is true, for example, for radar systems used above the sea surface. In the specific case, the systems capable of detecting a relatively small object such as the Titan are able to explore a strip of seabed of the size of a few tens, at most hundreds of meters, moving however very slowly. The time required to trace a missing vehicle is therefore linked to the vastness of the area in which to search. We now know that the Titan imploded, so the search was made even more complex as the hull was reduced to smaller parts. Furthermore, we must consider the presence of the much larger wreck of the Titanic, also divided into several parts, capable of masking the echo of smaller objects on the bottom.
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Why did the Titan implode?
The determining factor for this type of submarine is the resistance to pressure of the hull and of all the parts that compose it, such as the opening that allows the entry and exit of the personnel or the porthole that allowed to look outside . Something, for reasons that will have to be ascertained, must have yielded to the pressure.
Who could be responsible for the event?
I believe that very careful analyzes will be needed to determine the causes of the event. For this reason it will be crucial to be able to recover and examine the parts of the wreck by personnel with very advanced skills in the field of underwater constructions. Only after these analyzes will it be possible to attribute responsibility for the accident.
Nicholas Dammacco