A global fleet of ships has been dispatched over the past 48 hours to the Atlantic Ocean in a last-ditch attempt to save the lives of five people trapped in the Titanic submarine, a graphic shows.
Vessels and specialist equipment from the US, UK, Canada, and France have been dispatched to help search for the missing submersible vessel named Titan which set out to view the famous Titanic shipwreck on Sunday.
Five tourists paid around £200,000 to OceanGate Expeditions for what should have been an eight-hour trip but lost contact about 90 minutes after they submerged on Sunday.
The search has reached a critical point as the vital oxygen supply onboard has now run out.
However, experts say that the oxygen supply number is an imprecise estimate and could be extended if passengers have taken measures to conserve breathable air.
And no one knows if they have survived or not since the sub disappeared Sunday morning.
Hamish Harding, a British billionaire businessman adventurer, is among the five people on board the Titan.
He is with British-based Pakistani father and son, 48-year-old Shahzada Dawood and his 19-year-old son Sulaiman.
Along with French submersible pilot Paul-Henry Nargeolet, known as "Mr Titanic" and Stockton Rush, founder of OceanGate Expeditions.
A MarineTraffic playback feature allows us to see the rescue ship's movements over the past 48 hours
The latest addition to the fleet includes a British submariner and equipment from a UK firm.
A No 10 spokesman said: "At the request of the US Coastguard the UK has embedded a Royal Navy submariner to assist the search and rescue effort for the missing submarine. That is a Lieutenant Commander Richard Kantharia."
They have also sent a C17 Globemaster transporting specialist commercial equipment to help with search and rescue.
French research vessel L'Atalante arrived in the search zone at around 2 am GMT and is carrying the hugely important Victor 6000.
The Victor is an unmanned remote-controlled robot submarine that can reach depths of 20,000ft and it has now officially reached the sea floor.
There are five vessels on the scene including two private deep-sea cable-laying ships and two Canadian Coast Guard vessels. The Polar Prince, which is the vessel that put the Titan in the water on Sunday morning and American co-ordinators have made that the joint command centre for this operation
There is also a specialist deep sea winch that can drag heavy objects from the ocean floor.
