A missing submersible near the wreck of the Titanic that has kicked off a frantic international search has left the deep sea exploration community “shattered”, a famed Canadian scientist and veteran explorer has said.
“This is the day that we have been fearing for a long, long time – when you lose a sub in really deep water,” Joe MacInnis, a member of the first expedition to locate the wreck of the Titanic in 1985, told the Guardian on Monday night. “It doesn’t look good.”
Authorities from Canada and the US have deployed specialized aircraft and ships to search for the five people aboard a 6.4-metre vessel that lost contact about one hour and 45 minutes into a planned dive Sunday, nearly 400 miles (640km) off the coast of Newfoundland. MacInnes estimates that one hour and 45 minutes was long enough for the submersible, called Titan, to reach the Titanic wreck.
OceanGate Expeditions, the US company that owns the submersible, said it was “exploring all options” to bring the crew back safely.
OceanGate operates trips that combine commercial tourism with scientific research and exploration, to the final resting place of the ill-fated ocean liner that struck an iceberg in 1912 and sank, killing more than 1,500 of the 2,200 passengers and crew.
In deep sea expeditions, MacInnis said, crews often worry about the “trinity”: fire, hull failure or entanglement.
MacInnis is a veteran deep sea explorer who has completed two trips to the famed wreck with a Russian crew, as part of making the 1992 Imax documentary Titanica.
He is also a close friend of film-maker James Cameron who he introduced to the Russian submersible pilots involved. “The next thing you know Jim hires them and makes all his dives to the Titanic before he makes his big film,” he said, referring to the 1997 mega-blockbuster feature, Titanic, which Cameron directed.
On his second expedition to the Titanic, MacInnis and the crew briefly found themselves stuck on part of the wreck. A second sub was sent to investigate and between the two figure out a way to gently jiggle the craft free. On that same trip, the crew lost radio contact after the sub went behind the Titanic’s propellers to film footage for the documentary.
“I’ll tell you for a while we were scratching our heads and hoping everything was OK. As soon as they got back from underneath the stern, we got radio contact back. And that was a big, big relief.”
While MacInnis’ teams lost momentary contact, Titan had been out of contact for more than 30 hours by Monday night. “That’s a big concern, especially as time ticks on,” he said.
MacInnis said that in the event the submersible is located deep within the ocean, any recovery will be “incredibly costly”.
“In any accident, you really want an analysis of what went wrong. And I suspect in this case, there will be a lot of head scratching and [if lost] we’ll likely see an effort to recover it if they can.”
On Monday, Rear Admiral John Mauger of the US Coast Guard told reporters that crews were “doing everything we can” to find the submersible.
The coast guard is relying on aircraft, some of which have underwater detection capabilities. But officials admitted they only have the capability to search for sounds at the moment.
The outcome officials are hoping for is that the vessel somehow limped to the surface and is drifting somewhere in the North Atlantic, awaiting rescue.
“We’ve feared this for a long time,” said MacInnis, adding the news has rocked a tight-knit community of scientists and explorers who have spent much of their lives pushing further into the darkness of the deep sea.
“But this is the reality of the ocean, especially in its deeper waters. It really is a place of scorching fear. And it is a place of fugitive beauty,” he said.
