Underwater microphones designed to detect enemy submarines picked up an ‘anomaly’ likely to have been Titan’s explosion on Sunday, according to officials
THE MIRROR
The US Navy has revealed it detected an ‘anomaly’ in underwater acoustics on Sunday that is likely to have been the implosion of the missing OceanGate Explorations submersible, an official has said.
Titan lost contact with its mothership at around 9:45am that day – one hour and 45 minutes into its descent – with five passengers on board sparking a frantic search for the vessel.
Hopes of a successful rescue mission were raised on Tuesday, meanwhile, after a Canadian aircraft detected “banging” sounds in 30-minute intervals coming from the area where the sub vanished, according to an internal email update sent by the Department of Homeland Security’s National Operations Center.
However, those hopes were all but dashed on Thursday afternoon as the US Coast Guard revealed a ‘debris field’ including what appeared to be Titan’s landing frame and rear cover had been found 1,600 feet from the bow of Titanic.
And later on Thursday, a senior U.S. Navy official told The Wall Street Journal in a statement: “The U.S. Navy conducted an analysis of acoustic data and detected an anomaly consistent with an implosion or explosion in the general vicinity of where the Titan submersible was operating when communications were lost.
“While not definitive, this information was immediately shared with the Incident Commander to assist with the ongoing search and rescue mission.”
The official went on to add that the Navy reported the sound to the US Coast Guard command.
Discussing the debris find at the press conference earlier, undersea expert Paul Hankin said: “We found five different major pieces of debris that told us that it was the remains of the Titan.
“The initial thing we found was the nose cone, which was outside of the pressure hull. We then found a large debris field, within that debris field we found the front-end bell of the pressure hull.
“That was the first indication that there was a catastrophic event.
“Shortly thereafter we found a second smaller debris field. Within that debris field we found the other end of the pressure hull. We continue to map out the debris field, and as the admiral said, we will do the best we can to fully map out what’s down there.”
Coast Guard, Rear Adm Mauger, also referred to what was probably a “catastrophic implosion” based on patterns of the debris, before confirming that all five people on board had been killed.
He added, however, that no sounds were detected during the search mission that were consistent with such an occurrence.
“We’ve had sonar buoys in the water nearly continuously and have not detected any catastrophic events when those sonar buoys have been in the water,” he explained.
The five victims consisted of three British citizens including billionaire Hamish Harding. Shahzada Dawood and his son Suleman Dawood were also onboard along with French national and renowned diver Paul-Henri Nargeolet.
The fifth member of the team was OceanGate CEO and founder Stockton Rush, a former investment banker with an aerospace degree.
