they have confirmed that the debris found is from the submersible. cnn reporting it now. 500 meters from the titanic.
Titanic tourist submarine missing 6-19-2023 (Debris field found, passengers presumed dead. 06-22-23)
Wasn’t it a day or two later?
Anyway, my initial suspicion, and my continued suspicion, is that it was either wishful thinking related to coincidental natural sounds, or it was some other vessel in the area (or even far beyond it, maybe even on the surface for all I know) making similarly coincidental noise that the sonobuoys detected.
Something to understand about sound in water is that it tends not to travel in a straight line, can often end up getting trapped bouncing between different layers of ocean (due to temperature and salinity differences in particular) and so moves unpredictably.
When, for example, we would conduct sonar operations on two of my sonar-capable ships, we would actually deploy instruments, either *expendable or recoverable, to actually drop down into the water and provide information on “layers” so that we could get a sense of how sound might behave at that particular area of ocean at that particular time.
All that to say, it’s a science, but not, as of yet, an exact science.
For similar reasons, I would caveat an earlier comment up thread about having continuous communications during a dive as a matter of course: first, I read in another article that on an earlier dive there were several hours where they could not, in fact, communicate. But I don’t consider that to necessarily be a foreboding sign of poor craftsmanship in and of itself. Rather, it is entirely possible for everything to be working perfectly, and yet not be able to have communications between a submerged object and the surface, because while you might think it’s just a straight line of a few hundred, at most a few thousand, feet between them, once you have different layers of water (differing conditions of temperature and salinity) between the two, the signals might not penetrate, or if they do, they could be degraded to the point of being indiscernible.
*ETA: See, for example,
https://oceanexplorer.noaa.gov/facts/xbt.html
As I think I said in a later post: I have no idea how long it takes objects to fall through that much water; and would expect it to depend on the relative shape and mass of the objects.
– thanks for the info about sound moving in water. That also explains why they had so much trouble telling where whatever sound they did hear was coming from.
Not to mention the Reflective Fish Barrier.
Very much so.
Active sonar pings from military submarines can travel literally hundreds of miles and still be over 100dB if sent from the right place and depth. Different water layers can act as a waveguide.
I didn’t put a lot of credence into the banging noises and wasn’t planning on doing so until/unless the experts definitely said they were from the craft. Too many other possibilities.
They probably already knew this when they scheduled the 3:00 PM briefing.
yeah, it wasn’t sounding good this morning when they said debris field and moved the briefing time.
the company has sent out a statement that the 5 souls are lost.
I’m curious if the Coast Guard actually said that, or if they had said “oxygen will run out in 24 hours” and the reporter just time stamped it based on when that announcement was mad.
The supposed found parts pointed out in this tweet.
https://twitter.com/BBCWorld/status/1671946792991162383
Seems like maybe the fuselage (or whatever you call the main tube) might have undergone an unscheduled crumpling incident that released bits attached to it.
If the main tube was carbon fiber, would it crumple or splinter into little bits?
they found the tail cone first, then other parts. the rovs are staying on site to further investigate.
Maybe it’s the Titan. Maybe it’s bits of the Titanic that fell off 111 years ago during its descent. Maybe it’s something else wrecked on the bottom of the sea. We don’t know at this point.
Much like the banging - it might have been from the Titan. It might have been something else. The Coast Guard since yesterday has been saying they don’t know what is causing the “bangs”. There’s a lot of noise in the ocean, after all.
So… interesting, intriguing, but no matter what at this point it’s most likely all aboard the Titan are deceased (though I expect searches to continue for at least a bit). So, I’m a bit sad today for that, but not really surprised.
A great deal has been made of the game controller thing, and while I think that is something that could give someone pause it doesn’t look like NO thought was given to safety and backups here.
I’m also wondering about maintenance. Like… was there any? And if so, how thorough? In some exploratory endeavors you swap out some parts like seals or other bibs and bobs when they’re still “perfectly usable” because they so critical you don’t want to use such a part if there is any wear on it.
Or, to put it another way - some things can be “repaired” with duct tape with no impact on safety. Other things you have to replace with OEM are a strict schedule to avoid disaster. For some things, as frequently as after every single trip. Wonder if this was such a case?
Watching the briefing now - given that they said they’d taken the time to notify the families before the official announcement pretty sure they took their time before informing the public. Probably wanted to gather sufficient information to confirm what they were looking at.
Apparently parts of the pressure vessel survived, the titanium end-caps. I expect more information will be released in the future.
I have a name for my new thrash metal band.
Big Bang Theory episode title.
I’m sure they will try to bring up the bits if they can, because it would be very useful to discover exactly what failed.
This whole thing looks like a shit-show for sure, with basic safety fairly ignored. However, the technique they were using - a lightweight graphite pressure vessel with active monitoring rather than a much heavier steel or titanium one, has potential application for deep ocean exploration where weight matters - say, sending a probe to Europa’s oceans.
One thing about billionaires - some of them take stupid risks, but they also advance bleeding edge technologies no one else can afford, and which can eventually trickle down to everyone else.
The various X-prizes and record attempts by billionares have improved efficiency of boats used to haul average people and cargo as well. A billionaire wanting to go to Mars instead revolutionized spaceflight and dropped costs to orbit by at least an order of magnitude. A billionaire who built a crazy expensive telescope array to look for ET then died, and that array is doing a lot of great science.
RIP all aboard, and it’s too bad this particular billionaire was an idiot about safety. Not all of them are. James Cameron has built deep diving submersibles that are safe and used daily for scientific missions when not being used to indulge his adventurous spirit, along with advancing a lot of other underwater tech.
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Something like both. The crumpling would cause delamination and bits of material will come off as fibers break apart. It could end up looking like anything between a wadded up ball of paper and a fright wig of carbon fibers, with a few or a lot of bits that broke off completely.
I don’t understand the point of making the craft from composite materials in the first place. Composite materials don’t fail slowly, they don’t stretch and weaken before breaking, they snap suddenly. I didn’t think light weight was a valuable attribute for deep sea vessels.
They just reported on MSNBC that an older sister of Suleman Dawood was interviewed. She said her brother did not want to go on this, umm, excursion, but he consented because it was his father’s wish that his son accompany him on Father’s Day. Very sad.
Correct. We may never know but it they followed their own procedure that had resulted in safe dives in the past, they are probably ok. If someone installed something incorrectly and that caused the implosion, there is way more liability.