“Hypoxia, poisoning and hypothermia”
Tourists who are at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean in the Titan bathyscaphe, which is stuck there for some unknown reason, may face hypoxia, carbon monoxide poisoning and hypothermia. We talked about the possible risks for people trapped in water captivity with the head of the Hyperboria Group of the Institute of Biomedical Problems of the Russian Academy of Sciences Pavel Spirkov.
Diving of five tourists, among them: the pilot of the private company OceanGate Inc. Frenchman Paul-Henri Nargole, owner of Stockton Rush, British billionaire Hamish Harding, Pakistani businessman Shahzada Daoud and his son Suleiman began at about 4 am Moscow time. The ship Polar Prince, which delivered them to the site of the sinking of the Titanic, had to wait for them all the time on the surface, acting as a kind of base.
The divers descended without incident: the message that they were at the destroyed transatlantic steamer that sank in April 1912 came from them to the “mother” ship a little over an hour after the dive. After that, the connection was suddenly cut off. Fellow travelers from Polar Prince expected that the bathyscaphe would appear on the surface shortly after the break in communication, but this did not happen, and the captain of the ship gave a distress signal. In the hope that the bathyscaphe or one of its crew surfaced in an unplanned place, two planes circled the water area, covering about 1.5 thousand kilometers, but found nothing and no one.
Currently, rescuers are considering several possible causes of the emergency. First of all, they assume the failure of the power supply system, without which the ascent is impossible, and secondly, entanglement in the wreckage of the Titanic. According to the Irish Sun newspaper, contacted a few hours ago by Irish explorer Rory Golden, apparently on board the Polar Prince, he told reporters that he himself was in perfect order, and the whole team was focused on finding the submarine.
Recall that at the time of this writing, the bathyscaphe had been at a depth of about 4 thousand meters for about 35 hours with the available 93-hour reserve of autonomous power supply.
“The Russian deep-sea submersibles Mir have many times dived to the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean to the Titanic, but they have always successfully ascended,” Pavel Spirkov, an experienced deep-sea diving specialist, comments on the situation. – The only similar incident occurred in 1980 with the Argus deep-sea manned submersible of the P.P. Shirshov. He got entangled in the Black Sea in a cable passing along the bottom and could not surface in time. Three people sat at a depth of 48 hours until they were untangled. The cable was found in time, but it turned out that there were three of them. Only the rise of the latter gave a result — the Argus escaped from captivity.
— Despite the fact that the thermal protection did not allow the temperature to fall below 17 degrees, they were too cold. They descended lightly dressed, in shorts and T-shirts – they thought that they would not stay under water for long, but it turned out that they spent almost two days there. They covered themselves with wadded blankets, which were inside the deep-sea vehicle. To save oxygen, they tried to move as little as possible: a motionless person breathes less often.
– If oxygen supplies run out, hypoxia may occur, which, as a rule, adversely affects health. If, due to a lack of energy, the CO2 removal system jams in the device, poisoning with this gas may threaten. It happens that at depth some tourists are «covered» by claustrophobia, but if a person is in a group, this usually does not happen.
According to the captain of a Canadian rescue ship that is currently operating in the Atlantic, travelers have oxygen on greater depth will end on June 22 at about 8 am Moscow time. To search for the missing submersible «Titan» on the surface of the water, under water and from the air, all available means in that area are now mobilized.