The US Navy has said it detected an “anomaly” that was likely the Titan’s fatal implosion, soon after the submersible went missing, while film director James Cameron claims his sources in the deep-sea exploration industry also detected a “loud bang”.
The navy analysed its acoustic data after the Titan was first reported lost on its voyage to the wreck of the Titanic. It found an anomaly “consistent with an implosion or explosion in the general vicinity of where the Titan submersible was operating when communications were lost”, according to a statement.
The navy passed that information to the Coast Guard, which continued its search because the navy did not consider the data to be definitive.
The data came from a secret network of underwater sensors designed to track hostile submarines, the New York Times reported.
Cameron said he knew the submersible was lost from the start of the four-day search, after his sources reported similar information, the film director said on Thursday.
“We got confirmation within an hour that there had been a loud bang at the same time that the sub comms were lost. A loud bang on the hydrophone. Loss of transponder. Loss of comms. I knew what happened. The sub imploded,” Cameron told the Reuters news agency.
Cameron became a deep-sea explorer in the 1990s while researching and making his Oscar-winning blockbuster Titanic, and is part owner of Triton Submarines, which makes submersibles for research and tourism.
He said that he told colleagues in an email on Monday, “We’ve lost some friends,” and, “It’s on the bottom in pieces right now.”
On Thursday, after days of searching for the missing sub, the US Coast Guard announced that the crew members onboard Titan were probably killed instantly in a “catastrophic implosion” as it descended to the wreck of the Titanic two miles below the surface of the Atlantic Ocean.
A large debris field containing multiple sections of the vessel was spotted some 488 metres (1,600ft) from the bow of the Titanic earlier in the day by a remotely operated vehicle (ROV) scouring the seabed.
The Titan had been missing since it lost contact with its surface support ship on Sunday morning about an hour, 45 minutes into what should have been a two-hour dive to the world’s most famous shipwreck.
Five major fragments of the 6.7-metre (22ft) Titan were located in the debris field left by its disintegration, including the vessel’s tail cone and two sections of the pressure hull, Coast Guard officials said.
Those onboard the submersible were British adventurer Hamish Harding, 58; French veteran Titanic explorer Paul-Henri Nargeolet, 77; British-Pakistani businessman Shahzada Dawood, 48, and his 19-year-old son Suleman; and 61-year-old American Stockton Rush, co-founder of OceanGate, the company that operated the lost sub.
After their deaths were announced, Cameron said he wished he had sounded the alarm earlier, saying that he was sceptical when he heard OceanGate was making a deep-sea submersible with a composite carbon fibre and titanium hull.
“I thought it was a horrible idea. I wish I’d spoken up, but I assumed somebody was smarter than me, you know, because I never experimented with that technology, but it just sounded bad on its face,” Cameron told Reuters.
The cause of the Titan’s implosion has not been determined, but Cameron said he presumes the critics were correct in warning that a carbon fibre and titanium hull would enable delamination and microscopic water ingress, leading to progressive failure over time.
Other experts in the industry and a whistleblowing employee raised alarms in 2018, criticising OceanGate for opting against seeking certification and operating as an experimental vessel.
In 2019, OceanGate said it was concerned that the certification process could slow down development and act as a drag on innovation. “Bringing an outside entity up to speed on every innovation before it is put into real-world testing is anathema to rapid innovation,” it said.
Earlier on Thursday, Cameron appeared on ABC News and said that many people in the submersible community had been concerned by Titan.
“A number of the top players in the deep submergence engineering community even wrote letters to the company, saying that what they were doing was too experimental to carry passengers and that it needed to be certified and so on.”
“We celebrate innovation, right? But you shouldn’t be using an experimental vehicle for paying passengers that aren’t themselves deep ocean engineers,” he added.
Cameron said both the Titanic and the Titan tragedies were preceded by unheeded warnings. In the Titanic’s case, the captain sped across the Atlantic on a moonless night despite being told about icebergs.
“Here were are again,” Cameron said. “And at the same place. Now there’s one wreck lying next to the other wreck for the same damn reason.”
Cameron has made 33 dives himself to the wreck, having made not only the Oscar-winning 1997 film but also the documentary Ghosts of the Abyss. He claims to have spent “more time on the ship than the captain did back in the day”.
Reuters and Associated Press contributed to this report
