“Within the next 24 to 48 hours, up to ten ships are expected to arrive in the search area. We are using all possible means,” it appears, yesterday evening, during a press conference with the latest developments, Belgian Time.
The search area is vast, spanning 26,000 square kilometers, or twice the size of Connecticut and slightly smaller than Belgium (about 30,000 square kilometers). In that area, they search at a depth of 4 km. It seems that “this is an enormous research area”.
More and more planes, boats and other submarines have arrived in the search area in recent hours. The search is carried out from the air and water using aircraft, unmanned robots, sonar and other vessels.
And Sunday night, the Canadian and US Coast Guards dispatched several military aircraft to the site where communication was lost between the mothership, the Polar Prince, and the missing submarine Titan. It’s one of those fighter jets that dropped sonar buoys into the sea that picked up on the “flying” sound.
Also on site is the Atlante, a research vessel of the French Institute for Research and Exploitation of the Sea. On board that ship is an underwater robot, Vector 6000, which is considered the leader in underwater interventions. The Vector 6000 is powered by an eight-kilometer cable and can reach depths of 6,000 metres. The wreck of the Titanic is located at a depth of 4000 meters.
It seems that it is not yet clear the origin of the sound. “People who analyze sounds are specialists and look for patterns in the sound, but they haven’t yet been able to give a definitive answer about the origin.” According to the Coast Guard, a Canadian aircraft picked up the sounds on Tuesday, but also on Wednesday morning.
The search is carried out from the air by special submarine combat aircraft designed and equipped to detect submarines. These military aircraft are commonly used for maritime surveillance and anti-submarine missions. That’s why they have sensors, sonar systems, and advanced weapons systems on board that can detect submarines.
According to the US Coast Guard, the Canadian Navy ship Glace Bay, which is equipped with medical personnel and a decompression chamber to treat diving accidents, will soon join the site.
oxygen
The US Coast Guard expects that the missing submarine that dived to the Titanic ran out of oxygen Thursday morning local time (Thursday afternoon Belgian time). The Coast Guard bases this prediction on information provided by the owner of the Titan.
Usually five people on board had oxygen on Titan for 96 hours. According to the Coast Guard captain involved in the research, the calculation is based on passenger consumption. “One of the factors that makes it difficult to predict how much oxygen is left is that we don’t know how much oxygen is being consumed by each passenger on the submarine,” he told the BBC.
According to Mackenzie Margaret, a marine scientist who has worked a lot on submarines, there is another factor to consider. In a video on TikTok, the scientist explained that the air in the submarine is filtered using special carbon dioxide filters, which remove carbon dioxide from the air. Margaret thinks these filters may be saturated sooner than they run out of oxygen. “According to some people who have worked on Titan, the system is not very good, and it will most likely fail before it runs out of oxygen,” she says.
