Search teams have deployed remote-controlled equipment to the floor of the North Atlantic in search of a five-man submersible crew whose oxygen supply has likely run out.
The U.S. Coast Guard said the Canadian vessel Horizon Arctic has sent its remote operated vehicle to the deep-sea bed in search of the Titan submersible.
French ship L’Atalante, which has a Victor 6000 remote operated vehicle that can reach the 2.5-mile depth of the Titanic wreckage, has also been deployed.
“Victor is able to do visual exploration with all the video equipment it has,” Olivier Lefort, who works for the French oceanic research institute Ifremer, told Reuters. “It is also equipped with manipulating arms which could be used to extricate the sub, such as by sectioning cables or things that would be blocking it at the bottom.”
Deep-sea salvage equipment from the U.S. Navy has also arrived at St. John’s, Newfoundland, and is on standby to be sent to the search area. The salvage equipment was used to recover an F-18 fighter jet from the Mediterranean Sea last summer.
This comes after authorities estimated that the Titan’s 96-hour oxygen supply was depleted by around 7 a.m. Thursday. The vessel first made its descent Sunday morning, but it lost contact with the surface less than two hours after it had embarked for the Titanic.
U.S. Coast Guard Rear Adm. John W. Mauger told NBC’s “Today” show on Thursday that the search is continuing despite the news of the lack of oxygen.
“People’s will to live really needs to be accounted for as well,” Adm. Mauger said. “So we’re continuing to search and proceed with rescue efforts.”
Prospects of finding the vessel in the deep sea darkness are slim. Simon Boxall, an oceanography professor at England’s University of Southampton, told NBC that finding the Titan at such a depth, with only a small light to illuminate a search area twice the size of Connecticut, is a “big, big task.”
The missing crew is facing risks besides a lack of oxygen. The ocean’s near-freezing temperatures could cause the five men to die from hypothermia, which is what Titanic researcher and missing Titan passenger Paul-Henri Nargeolet said would happen in a 2017 interview.
Dwindling oxygen also means there’s more carbon dioxide inside the craft. Too much carbon dioxide in the bloodstream can cause hypercapnia, a fatal condition if left untreated.
In the tight confines of the 21-foot-long Titan, the saturation of carbon dioxide “becomes like an [anesthetic] gas, and you will go to sleep,” Dr. Ken LeDez, a hyperbaric medicine expert at Memorial University in St. John’s, told BBC News.
Authorities detected what they described as “banging noises” overnight Wednesday in the sprawling search area, and resources have been focused on that location. Experts on the scene have been working to distinguish whether those noises were clues about the missing vessel.
Search efforts mainly involved deploying sonar buoys on the water’s surface before additional ships arrived with deep-sea remote operated vehicles.
The Titan was first reported missing Sunday evening, and the U.S. Coast Guard immediately began coordinating a search with the Canadian coast guard and Canadian armed forces.
The Titanic’s wreckage site sits about 380 miles off the southern coast of St. John’s.
Aboard the Titan are OceanGate founder Stockton Rush, British explorer Hamish Harding, Titanic researcher Mr. Nargeolet, and British-Pakistani businessman Shahzada Dawood and his 19-year-old son, Suleman.
• Matt Delaney can be reached at mdelaney@washingtontimes.com.
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