Oceangate expenditions have now declared the five people aboard the Titan submersible have been believed to be dead in a statement on Thursday.
The people on board were Oceangate CEO Stockton Rush, Shahzada Dawood and his son Suleman Dawood, Paul-Henri Nargeolet and Hamish Harding.
The submarine lost contact shortly after starting its descend from the Atlantic Ocean’s surface to the fabled Titanic’s wreckage. It was estimated that the oxygen supply would last for 96 hours inside.
In a press briefing on Thursday, US Coast Guard Rear Admiral John Mauger said that the hunt for Titan is “consistent with a catastrophic loss of the pressure chamber.”
Mauger said that as soon as the decision was made, the families of everyone aboard were informed.
In a tweet by the Coast Guard, he announced that, “A debris field was discovered within the search area by a ROV near the Titanic and experts were evaluating the information.
An expert Davis Mearns said the debris contained a landing frame and a rear cover from the submersible.”
Guillermo Söhnlein, a co-founder of OceanGate who left the firm years ago, told a British television in response to the news of the debris’ discovery: “If there is a failure, it would be an instantaneous implosion. If that were the case, it would have occurred four days ago.
At a depth of over 2 miles, the Titan was subjected to pressure exceeding 5,500 pounds per square inch (PSI), according to Dr. Nicolai Roterman, a deep-sea ecologist and lecturer in marine biology at the University of Portsmouth.
Roterman claims if the sub failed, immediately exposing passengers to those types of pressures, the passengers would succumb to the ocean quickly.
“I think it is important to remember that to us humans, the deep sea is a very inhospitable place,” Roterman continued. Accidents will happen because even the most dependable technology has a chance to malfunction. We should anticipate more events like this as deep-sea tourism expands.