[The Guardian] Rescue teams trying to find the missing submersible Titan reported finding a “debris field” within the search area beneath the surface of the Atlantic on Thursday as hopes faded for finding the crew alive.
The US Coast Guard made the announcement in a tweet that gave no other information about its size or location. More details are expected at a press conference schedule for 3pm ET Thursday.
The debris field was discovered by a remotely operated vehicle (ROV) scouring the sea bed close to the 12,500ft deep wreck of the Titanic that the five-man crew was attempting to visit when they lost contact with a support vessel one hour and 45 minutes into Sunday’s scheduled 11-hour dive.
The search and rescue operation was already at a critical point on Thursday morning, with the submersible’s initial 96-hour supply of oxygen set to expire. There have also been no further reports of unidentified “banging” noises picked up on Tuesday night and Wednesday by sonar buoys deployed by Canadian military aircraft.
Officials said on Wednesday that the noises were “inconclusive”, and that recordings were being analyzed by US navy subsurface acoustics experts.
On Thursday morning, R Adm John Mauger of the US Coast Guard said those involved in the huge multinational search and rescue mission remained “hopeful” of still finding the crew alive.
“While we’re cognizant of the time, and we’ve factored in a lot of data and information into the search, this is still an active search and rescue at this point,” he told Sky News.
“We’re using the equipment that we have at the bottom … the ROVs, to expand our search capabilities.”
He said there was “a time and place” for a discussion over ending the operation but that moment had not yet come. He added he was grateful for the support of international partners, including the British Royal Navy.
Favorable weather conditions at the search site, about 400 miles south of St John’s, Newfoundland, were helping the effort, with rescuers “making the most of this weather window”, the coast guard said.
Meanwhile, a co-founder of OceanGate, the company that operates the missing sub, said he believed the Titan’s crew had a longer window of survival than many believed, despite the imminent expiration of breathable air.
“Today will be a critical day,” Guillermo Söhnlein, who founded OceanGate with Stockton Rush, one of the passengers aboard the vessel, said in a statement to Insider.
“I’m certain that Stockton and the rest of the crew realized days ago that the best thing they can do to ensure their rescue is to extend the limits of those supplies by relaxing as much as possible.
“I firmly believe that the time window available for their rescue is longer than what most people think. I continue to hold out hope for my friend and the rest of the crew.”
However, the family of Hamish Harding, a British explorer onboard the Titan, criticized OceanGate for waiting hours to alert the coastguard on Sunday after realizing the sub was out of contact.
“It’s very frightening. [It] took so long for them to get going to rescue [them], it’s far too long. I would have thought three hours would be the bare minimum,” Kathleen Cosnett, Harding’s cousin, told the Telegraph.
According to the accepted timeline of events, the support ship Polar Prince lost contact with Titan at about 9.45am ET on Sunday, but the coastguard did not receive the first report that it was missing until 5.40pm.
Also onboard were British-Pakistani businessman Shahzada Dawood and his 19-year-old son Suleman, and French veteran Titanic explorer Paul-Henri Nargeolet. OceanGate charges about $250,000 for a seat onboard the tourist submersible to visit the Titanic, which famously sank in 1912 with the loss of more than 1,500 lives.
A deep-ocean ROV from the Canadian vessel Horizon Arctic was the first to reach the seabed on Thursday morning, the Coast Guard said, and was set to be joined later by another from the French ship L’Atalante.
Also arriving at the site on Thursday was a Canadian navy vessel carrying a hyperbaric recompression chamber with capacity for six people.
Even if the missing sub is located, experts have said, rescuers would face a huge challenge raising it to the surface.
The best option is considered to be the US navy’s flyaway deep ocean salvage system (Fadoss), designed to provide “reliable deep ocean lifting capacity of up to 60,000lbs (27,200kg) for the recovery of large, bulky and heavy sunken objects such as aircraft or small vessels”.
