The five people aboard the Titanic submersible that had been missing for days have died after running out of the emergency supply of oxygen.
The passengers included British businessman Hamish Harding, Pakistani investor Shahzada Dawood and his son Suleman, French diver Paul-Henri Nargeolet and OceanGate CEO Stockton Rush.
The small vessel carrying them to the Titanic wreckage site had a “catastrophic implosion” according to reports.
The Titanic sank in the area of Newfoundland, some 450 kilometres off the coast of Canada, in the northern part of the Atlantic Ocean on Sunday, June 18, according to the United States Coast Guard said Thursday afternoon.
The expedition that the submersible and its crew embarked on was tremendously risky, according to industry experts and former passengers, the Guardian UK said.
It was reported that the Titan had to withstand the pressure from being almost 4,000 metres (13,100ft) below sea level – the depth at which the Titanic came to rest – and faced the threat of getting lost or losing contact with the surface.
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Stockton Rush, the pilot and one of the victims spoke of the dangers before the voyage: “One of the hardest things we have to do is get inches from the Titanic because we’re dropping two and a half miles through the water column and we don’t know what the currents are.
“And they change day to day and season to season and they change at 300 metres. There’s a huge shift at the thermocline [the transition layer between warmer surface waters and colder deeper water] and we don’t have a way of tracking that.”
Experts have also raised questions over whether all appropriate safety measures were followed.
The Guardian UK said the potential risks were made clear to passengers before undergoing the odyssey.
All standard checks and procedures were followed before the submersible set off on its voyage, but concerns over whether the vessel met industry safety standards have come to light.
Rush, in an unpublished interview with the Guardian late last year, said the vessel had been custom-built to reach and view the Titanic, describing it as capable of making a 2.5-mile drop through the water column but deft enough to be steered just inches from the wreck.
He added: “We’ve been fortunate that on the wreck the currents have been fairly light. If the currents are high then you change your profile and how close you’ll get to the wreck. But if it’s very calm … I can write my name in the mud with the sub. It’s that manoeuvrable.”
