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The amount of oxygen in a You do not have permission to view the full content of this post. Log in or register now. is becoming a vital issue, some experts say, as more advanced equipment is rushed to the North Atlantic Ocean in a complex international search operation now at its most critical juncture.
The submersible, known as “Titan,” begins each trip to explore the wreckage of the Titanic with an estimated 96 hours of life support and has been missing since Sunday morning, setting up Thursday morning as a key target for finding the vessel and those on board.
You do not have permission to view the full content of this post. Log in or register now. detected on Tuesday and Wednesday from underneath the water in the You do not have permission to view the full content of this post. Log in or register now. have provided hope for survivors – but it’s like finding a needle in a haystack and time is of the essence, experts say.
Inside the 21-foot submersible, with rudimentary controls and no room for its passengers to stretch out, the crew would have had “limited rations” of food and water, officials have said.
“We have to remain optimistic and hopeful,” Capt. Jamie Frederick, the response coordinator for the First Coast Guard District said during a news conference Wednesday.
As aircraft perform searches from above and remotely operated vehicles probe underwater, the number of You do not have permission to view the full content of this post. Log in or register now. is expected to double in the next day or two, Frederick said Wednesday.
A Canadian Coast Guard boat with sonar capabilities, the John Cabot, arrived on scene Wednesday to join the search. The US Navy is also sending You do not have permission to view the full content of this post. Log in or register now. that can pull heavy undersea objects from up to a depth of 20,000 feet to help with recovery if the submersible is found.
“We’ll continue to put every available asset that we have in an effort to find the Titan and the crew members,” Frederick said.
The search area for the missing submersible stretches about two times the size of Connecticut on the surface and goes down as deep as two-and-a-half miles, according to Frederick.
“It’s going to be almost impossible. We need a miracle – but miracles do happen,” oceanographer and water search expert David Gallo told CNN.
When banging noises were heard in the search area, crews redirected remotely operated vehicles to explore their origin, according to the US Coast Guard. The underwater sounds detected by sonar devices on Tuesday first came every 30 minutes and were heard again four hours later, according to an internal US government memo update on the search.
However, it remains unclear whether the noises are from the missing submersible, Frederick said. Naval experts were analyzing recordings of the sounds to determine their origin. “I can’t tell you what the noises are,” he said.
Various You do not have permission to view the full content of this post. Log in or register now. are likely complicating efforts to identify the noises, said Rick Murcar, who is the international training director for the National Association of Cave Divers.
Currents in the water can deflect the sound so that it appears like it is coming from miles away from where the actual source is, Murcar explained.
He likened the effort to locate the noise to trying to pinpoint a specific snare drum in a stadium full of cheering fans and other instruments.
If the submersible is found at depth, it would take a while to bring it to the surface and there won’t be a way to get oxygen into it, said ocean explorer Tom Dettweiler, who was part of the expedition that discovered the Titanic wreckage in 1985.
“The thing to do would be to bring it up as quickly as possible and open the hatch and get to the people. Unfortunately, it cannot be brought up all that quickly when it is on the end of a cable and dependent on the speed of a winch to bring it up,” Dettweiler told CNN. “You’re still talking about hours, potentially, to get it up.”
The Titan, operated by OceanGate Expeditions, lost contact with its mother ship Sunday about 1 hour and 45 minutes its dive to explore the Titanic’s wreckage – a trip the company offers for prices starting at $250,000, an archived version of the company’s website shows.
Aboard the Titan are OceanGate CEO and founder You do not have permission to view the full content of this post. Log in or register now., a source with knowledge of the mission plan said, along with British businessman Hamish Harding, Pakistani billionaire Shahzada Dawood and his son Suleman Dawood, and French diver Paul-Henri Nargeolet, according to You do not have permission to view the full content of this post. Log in or register now.. Officials have not publicly named those aboard.
Searchers are “very aware of the time sensitivity around this mission,” said a representative of the company that owns You do not have permission to view the full content of this post. Log in or register now., the support vessel that carried Titan to the site of the Titanic shipwreck.
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