The death of five explorers while on an expedition to the Titanic shipwreck raises uneasy questions
Five days of fervent prayers and hoping against hope ultimately didn’t achieve anything other than the worst fears coming true: The deep-sea submersible carrying five persons to the century-old wreck of the RMS Titanic in the North Atlantic has been found in pieces following a “catastrophic implosion” that killed everyone aboard. Five major fragments of the Titan submersible, different from a submarine in that it can’t navigate on its own and has to be dropped at and retrieved from the appointed spot, were discovered on seabed 1,600 feet from the bow of the ship that was termed “unsinkable” at the start of the second decade of last century. The Titanic struck an iceberg and sank during its maiden voyage in 1912, killing more than 1,500 people aboard 640 km south of Newfoundland but the romance surrounding it lives on. The search for the missing Titan grew increasingly desperate since Thursday, when the submersible’s estimated 96-hour air supply had been expected to run out if it were still intact. Apart from Stockton Rush (the founder and chief executive officer of OceanGate, the company owning the Titan and its pilot), the other four were British billionaire and explorer Hamish Harding, 58; Pakistani-born businessman Shahzada Dawood, 48, and his 19-year-old son Suleman, both British citizens; and French oceanographer and renowned Titanic expert Paul-Henri Nargeolet, 77, who had visited the wreck dozens of times and went by the nickname of ‘Mr Titanic’. The undersea expedition to the wreck, which OceanGate has been operating since 2021, cost $250,000 per person.
Mystery shrouds the implosion’s timing when Titan met its fate. During the five-day searches, sonar buoys had been deployed without detecting any loud, violent noise that would characterise the implosion. However, the US Navy said that an analysis of its own acoustic data had detected “an anomaly consistent with an implosion or explosion” near the submersible’s location. To this, filmmaker James Cameron, who directed the Oscar-winning movie Titanic and has himself ventured many times to the wreck in submersibles, said he learned of the acoustic findings within a day and “knew what it meant”. It’s pertinent for the industry to draw exigent lessons from this tragedy, which must now look inwards and scale up the culture of safety and accountability. Calls must be raised for additional safety regulations, though industry experts say any new measures may be impossible to enforce given the international nature of the business. They also cite as a reason the murky regulations on waters for deep-sea exploration, comparing the submersible operation with that of the time when aviation was in its infancy period. Moreover, experts say the Titan tragedy was an outlier, given that its maker opted against certifying the vessel, thus defying convention. Sombre as the thought may be, there is a small consolation: The five explorers perished doing, with a distinct spirit of adventure, just what they loved.
