«They were crushed in an instant»
«Alive one millisecond, dead the next,» a former U.S. Navy doctor recounts the tragic last moment of five members of a fatal dive on bathyscaphe «Titan». According to him, «they were crushed instantly.»
U.S. Navy veteran Dr. Dale Mole said the sub would explode instantly. According to him, those who were on board most likely did not even know what happened to them.
According to the Daily Mail, a distinguished former U.S. Navy doctor revealed what could have happened in the tragic last minutes of the Titan five men before their bathyscaphe was subjected to a «catastrophic explosion».
Dr. Dale Mole, a former director of the U.S. Navy's Department of Underwater Medicine and Radiation Health, told DailyMail.com the death of the crew of the submersible was quick and painless, almost instantaneous due to the extraordinary pressure created by the ocean at depth.
Mole said: “It was so sudden that they didn’t even know about the problem or what happened to them. It’s like being here for one minute and then turning off the light. One millisecond you are alive, and the next millisecond you are dead.»
U.S. Coast Guard Rear Admiral John Mauger confirmed at a press conference on Thursday that a search for the Titan had unearthed debris that «corresponded to the catastrophic loss of a pressure chamber.»
< p>The crew was more than 2 miles below the surface of the ocean, which would have generated a pressure of over 5,500 psi.
On board were OceanGate CEO Stockton Rush, 61; French Navy veteran Paul-Henri Narjolet, 77; British billionaire Hamish Harding, 58; Pakistani businessman Shahzada Dawood, 41; and his son Suleman, who was only 19 years old.
The tiny craft carrying the crew was protected by a pressure chamber, a pressurized compartment that maintains an internal pressure well above ambient pressure, a compressed gas supply system to control internal pressure, and a supply of breathing gas for the passengers.
Doctor Mole said: “The pressurized enclosure is the chamber in which the passengers are. It sounds like they hit bottom when the pressure vessel exploded, and usually when it gives way, it gives way all at once. It looks like it was a carbon fiber cylinder that gave way and caused an explosion.”
How the pressure chamber was hacked remains unclear. But such an explosion could be due to a leak, a power failure, or a small fire due to a short circuit.
The result could be a strong and instantaneous explosion, when high-pressure water from the outside rushed in, tearing off the back cover, landing frame and tearing apart the hull of the submarine, crushing those inside.
Mole said: “They would have been torn to shreds. An implosion is when a pressure wave is directed inward, while an explosion is when a pressure wave or shock wave comes out from whatever source.»
He explained that this is like overinflating the air balloon — the balloon will eventually burst when there is too much pressure.
In an explosion, the opposite happens: when the external pressure is greater than the container can take, then the insides collapse.
Mole said : «When someone stands on an empty soda can, it will support your weight, but if you press the walls, the can immediately falls apart.»
He added: «It's just a place where debris, fragments and everything gets in due to a strong external force. In this case, it was the ocean. At least at the depth of the Titanic, which is 12,500 feet, the external pressure was 6000 psi. This is the pressure that, if there was a weakness in the hull, would lead to the destruction of the hull and the sudden appearance of a shock wave. An implosion can certainly be as destructive as an explosion.
According to Scientific American, if a submersible had been near the Titanic, it would have experienced higher pressure than a bite from a great white shark.
Nikolai Roterman, a deep-sea ecologist at the University of Portsmouth, UK, agreed, that if such an explosion did occur, the pressure would kill the occupants almost instantly: «If there were any breach in the hull, the passengers would almost instantly drown in the ocean.»
A new report notes that the US Navy may have heard the sound of an explosion on Sunday morning, but extensive rescue efforts were still ongoing.
«The US Navy analyzed the acoustic data and found an anomaly consistent with an implosion or explosion in the immediate close to where the Titan submersible was operating when communications were lost,» a senior US Navy official said.
Earlier Thursday, Coast Guard Rear Admiral J. John Mauger said it was too early to tell if there was an explosion at the time of the last report. The explosion was not detected by the sonar buoys used by the search teams, he said, suggesting it happened before they arrived — and was indeed heard by the US Navy.
«We had listening devices all over the water, and we have not heard any signs of a catastrophic failure of them, — said Admiral Mauger. “The explosion would have produced a significant broadband sound that would have been picked up by sonar buoys.”
It is not known why the US Navy did not release information about the likely explosion. It is also not known if they informed the families or rescue teams of their analysis.
One of the reasons may be that they wanted to start a search and rescue mission in the hope that their information was incorrect and did not want to give any grounds for stopping the search.
A glimmer of hope came earlier this week when the Coast Guard confirmed that persistent «popping» sounds had been detected by a P-3 aircraft, but search teams were unable to find the source of the sound or confirm that these were the SOS signals the world was hoping for.
Instead, on Thursday, the French Viking 6000 submersible found the wreckage of an exploding bathyscaphe near the site of the sinking of the Titanic. In addition to the ship's landing frame and rear cover, which were the first wreckage discovered, the remotely operated deep submersible also found fragments of a strong hull — the main hull of the bathyscaphe.