The desperate search for the Titan sub

Samantha Hawley: Hi, I’m Sam Hawley, coming to you from Gadigal Land. This is ABC News Daily. It’s a story that’s captivating the world: The missing five men who went deep into the ocean to try and get a glimpse of the wreckage of the Titanic. Oxygen may have run out in the missing Titan submersible, but rescuers are still hard at work. Today, an oceanographer on the dangers and complexities of the mission.

Newsreader: The frantic search becoming more urgent tonight for those five people missing.

Newsreader: Now less than 20 hours of oxygen remain for the five people who.

Newsreader: (speaks in French)

Newsreader: A tourist sub that’s vanished thousands of metres below the surface of the Atlantic Ocean.

Prof Arthur Trembanis: My name is Art Trembanis. I’m a professor of oceanography at the University of Delaware.

Samantha Hawley: Art, the whole world is gripped by this story.

Prof Arthur Trembanis: Yeah. I mean, it feels like an underwater Apollo 13 sort of moment.

Newsreader: The flight of the Apollo 13 to the moon is in serious jeopardy this morning and is not going to make a moon landing in the.

Prof Arthur Trembanis: Same same way that, you know, the world was captivated when when those astronauts were stuck on the on the far side of the moon in the 70s.

Samantha Hawley: Not many of us are, I don’t think, would choose to go in a tiny submersible and head deep into the ocean. It’s a pretty adventurous thing to do, right? But you’ve done it, you’ve been in a similar vessel before. Just tell me what it’s like.

Prof Arthur Trembanis: Sure, well, so I’ve been in one of the precursor vessels, the Cyclops One, on a very, very modest dive of just, you know, some tens of metres. And actually I’m while I’m an ocean explorer and a member of the Explorers Club, I’ve really spent my career using underwater robots to really go and do the the heavy lifting and the deep diving tasks because, you know, I guess I’m not claustrophobic, but I think I’d rather send the robots off into these watery places because of course, all the challenges that that we’re seeing and this may as well be, you know, beyond the moon for for the level of challenges that this brings. I mean, this would be unprecedented. The the previous, deepest rescue in the 70s early 70s of a Pisces submersible was 500m of water. You know, we’re talking 3800m of water. It’s never, something like this has never been done.

Samantha Hawley: Tell me about inside the Titan, because it’s a really tight squeeze, isn’t it? It’s really small.

Prof Arthur Trembanis: Yeah. So I was inside a cyclops a sister ship and a very similar size and dimensions to it, and it feels like you’re inside a hollowed out passenger home minivan. You sit legs akimbo with socks on on a on a, you know, maybe a foam mat or a or a pillow. It’s very austere because it’s not first class comfort on a Trans Pacific flight. This is your inside this experimental submersible.

Samantha Hawley: Yeah. And there’s no seats. And there’s a single viewpoint that’s 21 inches in diameter. Not for the claustrophobic.

Prof Arthur Trembanis: No, no, for sure. This tiny little window into the into the watery world. And you kind of have to you have to position and kind of crawl over each other to kind of get into different places within the submersible.

Stockton Rush: Let’s take a look at Titan. So we’re coming into the sub. This is the in 2022.

Samantha Hawley: The boss of Oceangate Expeditions, Stockton Rush, Oceangates, the company that runs the Titan, he appeared in a CBS film, and he described how it’s operated with a single remote control, a game controller. Unbelievable.

Stockton Rush: We’ve taken a completely new approach to the sub design, and it’s all run with this game controller and these touch screens. So if you want to go forward, you press forward. If you want to go back, you go back, turn left, turn right, go down, go up.

Prof Arthur Trembanis: I mean, I think there’s been a lot sort of made about sort of that. I think, you know, when you’re talking about these sort of consumer grade electronics, they’ve been very well tested. They’re nice, they’re ergonomic. We use similar type controllers over the years for many of our different robotic systems that one happens to be wireless would have probably gone for a wired one. But I think that’s a clever innovation. And I don’t you know, I think that that one sort of makes sense to me.

Samantha Hawley: When things go wrong, though, Art with submarines or submersibles like this, things tend to go really wrong, don’t they? There’s been this huge international effort to try and find the Titan, the US Coast Guard. You know, there was a sort of glimmer of hope there for a moment, wasn’t there, for them, because there was knocking that was was heard yesterday.

US Coastguard spokesperson: A Canadian P-3 detected underwater noises in the search area. As a result, ROV operations were relocated in an attempt to explore the origin of the noises. Although the ROV searches have yielded negative results, they continue.

Prof Arthur Trembanis: Additionally, the caution I have in all of that is that, you know, that it is it’s a data point, but it’s it’s easy to potentially get get sort of taken down a primrose path at times when it is at such a heightened level and there’s such a yearning for some hope and for some bits of evidence, I think it’s being considered and it’s being analysed by experts. Bear in mind we have increasingly a number of of vessels on the surface assets underwater and above in this area that are all themselves producing noise. And I kept thinking back to early in the search for MH370 when they had vessels out there and they were at one point found themselves chasing their tails for phantom sounds that ended up being sourced back to one of the other ships. From the moment.

Journalist: From the moment the MH370 vanished from radar. The search for the plane has been characterised by confusion, mistakes and false hope.

Prof Arthur Trembanis: What you’re seeing play out in this multinational I mean, it’s the US Coast Guard, Canadian Coast Guard, there’s French ships, you’ve got commercial groups. There’s been a tremendous and amazingly rapid, actually manoeuvring and posturing of these of these assets that are very difficult to come by.

US Coastguard spokesperson: Several P-3 flights have heard noises as yesterday, and we put assets there. We relocated assets immediately. The surface search is now approximately two times the size of Connecticut and the subsurface search is up to two and a half miles deep.

Prof Arthur Trembanis: But what I’ve what I’ve seen as it’s playing out is, one, this is still very much in the search and rescue mode. And and that the Coast Guard and all the members of the team are approaching it very methodically.

US Coastguard spokesperson: With respect to food and water. It’s my understanding there are some limited rations. I can’t tell you exactly how much they have aboard, but they do have some limited rations aboard.

Samantha Hawley: So let’s have a look now at the Titan expeditions because they’ve been going on since 2021. Just tell me about the journey that they take.

Prof Arthur Trembanis: Well, sure. You know, one does not just randomly find oneself at that Titanic site. You know, it’s remote. And and there’s that means that you’ve got to come out there with everything you need and hope and help is is, you know, you know, days away if that. And so it’s it’s a challenging place that the North Atlantic it can be terrible conditions they’ve actually for the search efforts it’s actually been pretty good these last few days that’s that’s been a blessing but you’ve got the challenges on the surface plus it’s at a depth of about 3800m. You’re looking at 380 times atmospheric pressure. At that depth. You’ve got currents throughout the water column. Saltwater and electronics just are challenging and you’ve got organisms small and large, that can cause trouble, potential drifting debris and limited communications. Even even when things are operable. All of these facets actually make, you know, deep ocean exploration. You know, I stand on this opinion that it’s harder than than going to space and and that’s why they’ve had more people have gone to space than have gone to certainly to the Titanic or the these depths.

Samantha Hawley: Gosh. Okay. That really puts it into some perspective. So these five people on board, they’re somewhat adventurous, I think that’s pretty safe to say. Of course, one of them is Stockton Rush And I read actually, interestingly, that his wife is a descendant of two first class passengers who died on the Titanic when it sank. So there’s a link there that’s interesting. There’s other really interesting people on there, too, isn’t there? There’s Hamish Harding. He’s a billionaire. And others.

Prof Arthur Trembanis: Paul-Henri Nargeolet, both the Nargeolet and Harding are like myself or members of the Explorers Club of one of the leads of the Titanic Foundation and a veteran of more than 30 some dives to the site. So he was sort of the the subject matter expert on there. So yeah, these are accomplished individuals taking on a huge challenge and a risky endeavour in the best of conditions. And here we’re seeing it play out.

Samantha Hawley: And if rescuers do actually locate it, is it possible to bring it to the surface? How would they do that?

Prof Arthur Trembanis: Yeah. So, you know, that first part is itself an amazing thing, which is to find it. And then then it rapidly goes from being search to to recovery. And with some of the deep assets, it could be that these RVs have very strong hydraulic arms that could clamp on to and try to perhaps haul it up to the surface or or attach a cable. All of that, though, takes time as well. And and slowly then bringing it back up to the surface. So it’s it generally these things would be you know, would take weeks or more of of careful planning and getting, you know, other assets to them. And it’s really a race against the clock right now.

Samantha Hawley: Yeah, of course, as we mentioned, this is an incredibly hostile environment, one of the most hostile on Earth, the bottom of the ocean, not for human beings, really, do you think we should continue in this in this way? You know, should we really be going so deeply down into the ocean or should we leave it, as you sort of suggested, to the robots?

Prof Arthur Trembanis: I think robotic exploration is human exploration. I mean, I think if we look not just to the to the eternal darkness of the oceans, but into the into the heavens in this space, we see that exploration of our of our home planet and of our solar system has has been done in these last few decades by a lot of robotic systems. We have robots on Mars and the moon. And I think it is important that we that we continue to explore, you know, our ocean. We’ve only mapped less than 24%. We just recently hit 24% of the of the seabed surface of our planet and all of human history. It’s taken us to get to this point. We have better maps of the moon and Mars, than we do have our own seabed. I understand the compelling draw there, just as we do for many historical sites around our planet. But it has to be done cautiously and carefully.

Samantha Hawley: Arthur Trembanis is a professor of oceanography at the University of Delaware. This episode was produced by Veronica Apap, Flint, Duxfield, David Coady, Anna John and Sam Dunn, who also did the mix. Our supervising producer is Stephen Smiley. Over the weekend, catch This Week with Mel Clark, she’ll be looking at the real time reporting of deaths in custody. I’m Sam Hawley. ABC News Daily will be back again on Monday.

Thanks for listening.