Since the viewing window was not intact when they brought it up I’m going to make a guess. It was designed to resist external pressure. If the carbon fiber shell imploded it would have blown the window out. it’s likely that the window rim is still mounted to the hull and the fracture lines will show it was punched outward.
In the past I’ve experimented with shock waves using plastic water bottles. OK, I’m a nerd. When dropped from 20 feet onto a hard surface the impact shock wave moves up the bottle and punches a perfect hole in the cap that is the width of the opening. It’s quite dramatic how the energy travels. Although the energy of the sub implosion traveled through a gas versus a liquid I think the process is the same and this is what happened to the window. If that’s what happened then the occupants ejected through the window which would scatter their remains starting at the height of the event above the ocean floor.
Do we have any indication or knowledge of the depth the vessel was at when it failed? If it failed early in it’s descent that could explain the more intact nature of the wreckage we’re seeing.
They lost contact with the surface ship 1:45 into an approximately 2:30 dive. I don’t think we know that’s when the implosion happened, but it would be about 3/5 down.
They could also have been trying an emergency ascent at the time with no way of knowing how far that got.
I don’t know if it’s linear but I’ve seen mention it was an 1hr 45 min into a 2 hr descent. If it’s a linear descent that would be roughly 11,000 feet.
I was wondering why it took so long to alert authorities and now it makes more sense. They left at 9 am and were supposed to return at 06:10 pm. They contacted authorities at 06:35 pm when it didn’t surface.
I wish I could find a source that says he crew of the Polar Prince heard the implosion. I’m not sure how they communicated with the sub but it was done via text messages made every 15 minutes.
I can’t find a specific time that the Navy said they heard an implosion or how that correlates to when communication was lost. That would be possibly elucidating.
Radio waves either bounce off the ocean or are absorbed by it, leaving submersibles with limited methods of communication, according to Jim Bellingham, a professor at Johns Hopkins and a pioneer in underwater robotics.
Submersibles like the Titan instead use underwater sounds to transmit data packets across the ocean, experts said. The receiving party aboard a support ship can then use a hydrophone to receive the data transmitted acoustically, which can then be converted into understandable information like text or audio, according to experts.
That had to be a significant sound wave. If the support ship was using a hydrophone they had to hear the implosion and note the time stamp in relation to loss of contact with the sub.
I don’t think we’re seeing that – or at least, I haven’t seen such evidence. I did make the comment earlier on that one of the carbon fiber pieces looked remarkably intact, but that was from the unpressurized tail fairing. The titanium end caps might be expected be intact just because of their intrinsic strength. In any case, whatever their depth may have been, the pressure was by definition enough to implode a vessel that had been designed to withstand high pressures.
True, but it’s hard to infer intuitively just how that might have affected different parts of the structure. The window went suddenly from an immense but constant pressure from the outside to a very strong dynamic set of forces on the inside. How that might have affected it is hard to guess. It conceivably could have shattered, even if it was very thick.
I’ve only just skimmed this New Yorker piece, but those guys generally do superb journalism. The little one-box summary gives you the gist of what it’s about.
Actually the bottle experiment showed how energy transmitted. The bottles didn’t explode. The energy transmitted up to the top and cored out the cap. The bottles were intact. The cap was still firmly attached to the bottle but now had a hole in it.
In this case the energy from the initial implosion will be transmitted “somewhere”. if the pressure wave starts in the middle it will travel along the walls of the sub to until it hits the end-caps. One of the end-caps has a window and is presumably a weaker point in comparison to the other end-cap.
Keep in mind I’m talking about the initial shock wave that’s occurring in milliseconds and not the resulting destruction of the sub.
And it’s conjecture at this point but I mentioned it because they brought the hull up with a strap through the window so it was almost certainly missing when they found it. I don’t want to derail a thread that’s been tagged as breaking news.
McCallum, who was leading an expedition in Papua New Guinea at the time, knew the outcome almost instantly. “The report that I got immediately after the event—long before they were overdue— was that the sub was approaching thirty-five hundred metres,” he told me, while the oxygen clock was still ticking. “It dropped weights”—meaning that the team had aborted the dive—“then it lost comms, and lost tracking, and an implosion was heard.”
To my reading, the article puts a whole new perspective on the story. The early notion that “Rush was warned about potential safety issues” has now become “vessel was widely regarded by experts as dangerously inadequate and an accident waiting to happen” (my paraphrase) and Rush himself as reckless and arrogant. Rush refused to consider DNV certification because he basically felt they were a bunch of stodgy bureaucrats who would have to be “educated” about his brilliant innovations, even though he was assured they were comprised of top engineers who had been valuable contributors to the design of previous subs – subs like “Limiting Factor” which didn’t implode, even in the Challenger Deep, and which was certified to “unlimited” depths.
If we’re to assume that information came from the support ship then they knew from the start it had imploded and waited until the scheduled return time to alert authorities.