titanic wreckage tour

Here’s How You Can Visit the Wreck of the Titanic—for $125,000

A series of expeditions will take tourists down to the ill-fated ship in 2021

Courtesy of NOAA/Institute for Exploration/University of Rhode Island (NOAA/IFE/URI)

You’re probably familiar with the RMS Titanic: in 1912, the world’s largest ocean liner of the day embarked on her maiden voyage from Southampton, England, to New York, during which she struck an iceberg, sank, and ultimately took more than 1,500 lives. The Titanic’s final resting place remained a mystery until 1985, when American marine geologist Robert Ballard and French oceanographer Jean-Louis Michel discovered the wreck in the crushing depths of the frigid North Atlantic, nearly 2.5 miles beneath the surface of the sea. 

Rather unsurprisingly, visiting the Titanic has become a bucket-list trip for maritime historians, oceanographers, and, well, anyone who has deep enough pockets to go. However, expeditions are rare: only one team has visited the site in-person in the last 15 years. But all that’s about to change.

OceanGate Expeditions , a company that provides well-heeled clients with once-in-a-lifetime underwater experiences, has announced a series of six trips to the Titanic via submersible in 2021. Each has space for nine paying tourists, whose $125,000 tickets will help offset the cost of the expeditions (and put a pretty penny in the pocket of OceanGate owner Stockton Rush).

OceanGate’s expeditions will each run for 10 days out of St. John’s, Newfoundland, Canada. Nine tourists, who are actually dubbed “mission specialists” on this expedition, will join the expedition crew on each sailing, and they’ll be expected to participate in the research efforts—this isn’t just a sightseeing affair. OceanGate’s goal is to extensively document the Titanic wreck before it disintegrates entirely due to a deep-sea bacteria that eats iron, which researchers are concerned might happen within the next few decades. As this is a scientific project, mission specialists will have to meet certain physical criteria to ensure their compatibility with the expedition, not to mention training, which includes a test dive.

On each expedition, each mission specialist will be able to partake in a single six- to eight-hour dive to the Titanic via the private Titan submarine, which includes the 90-minute descent and 90-minute ascent. The sub seats five—a pilot, a scientist or researcher, and three mission specialists—and it does have a small, semi-private bathroom for emergencies, in case you were wondering.

Now, it should be known that this isn’t OceanGate’s first attempt to visit the iconic wreck: two previous expeditions had to be scrubbed. (In 2018, the sub was hit by lightning, and its electrical systems were fried, and in 2019, there were issues with sourcing a ship for the expedition.) But hey, perhaps the third time's the charm!

Several international treaties protect the Titanic—the wreck sits in international waters—but their primary goal is to prevent looters and illegal salvage operations from damaging and disrespecting the wreck. However, in terms of tourism, it’s actually perfectly legal to visit the wreck, so long as the expedition doesn’t intrude upon it (i.e., land on the deck or enter the hull.)

“A review of the International Agreement on Titanic, as well as the 2001 UNESCO Convention on Underwater Cultural Heritage, would reveal that non-intrusive visits do not even require a permit or authorization,” said Ole Varmer, a retired legal advisor to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), who was instrumental in negotiating the legal protection of the wreck. “The scope of the prohibition against commercial exploitation of underwater cultural heritage is to prevent unauthorized salvage and looting; it does not include non-intrusive visits regardless of whether they are for-profit or not.”

In terms of OceanGate Expeditions, the company is working with NOAA, the federal agency in charge of implementing the International Agreement on Titanic for U.S.-based Titanic activities, to ensure it follows all protocols set down by that agreement.

There are two major factors to consider regarding ethically visiting the Titanic. First, it’s a memorial site to the lives lost during the disaster, so the wreck should be treated with respect. But that, of course, is true of all memorial sites around the world.

“Speaking as one who visited Titanic’s wreck twice during RMS Titanic, Inc.'s 1993 and 1996 Research and Recovery expeditions, I see nothing unethical about visiting the wreck, nor about helping to defray the significant expense of bringing a visitor to the wreck,” explained Charles Haas, president of the Titanic International Society. “People around the world learn by seeing and visiting. They pay for access to museums, cathedrals, monuments, exhibitions, and, yes, final resting places.”

But second, it’s a fragile piece of cultural heritage. It should be protected—the expedition organizer must take appropriate steps to ensure that it won’t disturb the wreck.

“In the past, submersibles visiting the site by RMS Titanic, Inc. [the only company legally allowed to salvage the wreck], and others have rested on the deck of the hull portions,” says Varmer. “That practice has likely caused some harm and exacerbated the deterioration of the site.  Hopefully, that will no longer be practiced or permitted.”

Per OceanGate’s description of its expeditions, the company’s submersible won’t disturb the wreck, so if you have $125,000 lying around, fee; free to spring for the bucket-list trip of 2021!

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See the Titanic in Stunning Detail With New 3D Scan

Researchers collected 16 terabytes of data to create the very first full-sized 3D scan of the wreckage

Daily Correspondent

More than a century after the Titanic sank during her maiden voyage across the Atlantic, deep-sea researchers have created the first full-sized, 3D digital scan of the wreckage.

Over a period of six weeks last summer, the team used two remotely operated underwater vehicles to explore the shipwreck from all angles, as well as the surrounding debris field that stretches for up to three miles. Items that belonged to the vessel’s roughly 2,200 passengers and crew members—such as champagne bottles, watches and shoes—are still scattered across the seafloor.

In total, the two submersibles captured more than 16 terabytes of data—715,000 images and a high-resolution video—in the North Atlantic, reports the  New York Times ’ April Rubin. Researchers then spent seven months piecing together a “one-to-one digital copy, a ‘twin,’ of the Titanic in every detail,” says Anthony Geffen, who leads  Atlantic Productions , the film company making a documentary about the modeling process, to the  Associated Press ’ Sylvia Hui.

View this post on Instagram A post shared by Atlantic Productions (@atlantic.productions)

The result: a model that’s incredibly detailed, showing even tiny features like the serial number on the ship’s propeller.

“This is the Titanic as no one had ever seen it before,” says Gerhard Seiffert, a 3D imaging expert for Magellan, the deep-sea investigation company leading the project, to  CNN ’s Niamh Kennedy.

On April 10, 1912, the Titanic departed from Southampton, England, and began sailing west toward New York City. The vessel struck an iceberg near Newfoundland on April 14 , proceeding to sink in just a few hours. More than 1,500 passengers and crew members died in the wreck.

First located in 1985 , the ship’s wreckage is situated about 435 miles off the coast of Canada, roughly 12,500 feet—2.4 miles—below the water’s surface.

With the model now complete, its creators hope it will help Titanic researchers more accurately piece together  what happened during the famed disaster. Anyone interested in the vessel’s history will be able to use the model to walk through the ship virtually, “as if the water has been drained away,” writes Magellan in a statement.

Already, the scan is leading to new discoveries: For instance, researchers noticed for the first time that one of the Titanic ’s lifeboats wasn’t deployed used because it was “blocked by a jammed metal piece,” reports the Times .

“There are still questions, basic questions, that need to be answered about the ship,” says Parks Stephenson, a Titanic expert who was not involved in the project, to  BBC News ’ Rebecca Morelle and Alison Francis.

The new model, he adds, is “one of the first major steps to driving the Titanic story towards evidence-based research—and not speculation.”

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Sarah Kuta is a writer and editor based in Longmont, Colorado. She covers history, science, travel, food and beverage, sustainability, economics and other topics.

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3d “digital twin” showcases wreck of titanic in unprecedented detail, “this is a new phase for underwater forensic investigation and examination.”.

Jennifer Ouellette - May 17, 2023 8:43 pm UTC

The RMS Titanic sank to the bottom of the North Atlantic in 1912, but the fate of the ship and its passengers has fascinated the popular imagination for more than a century. Now we have the first full-size 3D digital scan of the complete wreckage—a "digital twin" that captures Titanic in unprecedented detail. Magellan Ltd, a deep-sea mapping company , and Atlantic Productions (which is making a documentary about the project) conducted the scans over a six-week expedition last summer.

“Great explorers have been down to the Titanic ... but actually they went with really low-resolution cameras and they could only speculate on what happened," Atlantic Productions CEO Andrew Geffen told BBC News . “We now have every rivet of the Titanic , every detail, we can put it back together, so for the first time we can actually see what happened and use real science to find out what happened." 

Further Reading

Titanic  met its doom just four days into the Atlantic crossing, roughly 375 miles (600 kilometers) south of Newfoundland. At 11:40 pm ship's time on April 14, 1912,  Titanic hit that infamous iceberg and began taking on water, flooding five of its 16 watertight compartments, thereby sealing its fate. More than 1,500 passengers and crew perished; only around 710 of those on board survived.

Titanic remained undiscovered at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean until an expedition led by Jean-Louis Michel and Robert Ballard reached the wreck on September 1, 1985. The ship split apart as it sank, with the bow and stern sections lying roughly one-third of a mile apart. The bow proved to be surprisingly intact, while the stern showed severe structural damage, likely flattened from the impact as it hit the ocean floor. There is a debris field spanning a 5-by-3-mile area, filled with furniture fragments, dinnerware, shoes and boots, and other personal items.

As reported previously , we've seen images and video footage of the wreck since it was discovered in the mid 1980s. That includes the  footage shot by director James Cameron in 1995 for sequences featured in his  blockbuster 1997 film —although much of the latter was actually miniature models and special effects filmed on a set, since Cameron couldn't get the high-quality footage he needed for a feature film.

Last year, a private company called OceanGate Expeditions released a one-minute video showcasing the first 8K video footage of the wreck of the Titanic , showing some of its features in new, vivid detail. One could make out the name of the anchor manufacturer (Noah Hingley & Sons Ltd.), for instance, and the footage also gave us a better look at the bow, hull number one, the number-one cargo hold, solid bronze capstans, and one of the single-ended boilers. The footage was shot during the company's 2022 descent, with guests forking over $250,000 apiece for a seat on the submersible. A second OceanGate expedition to the Titanic wreckage was planned for this year.

The joint mission by Magellan and Atlantic Productions deployed two submersibles nicknamed Romeo and Juliet to map every millimeter of the wreck, including the debris field spanning some three miles. The result was a whopping 16 terabytes of data, along with over 715,000 still images and 4K video footage. That raw data was then processed to create the 3D digital twin. The resolution is so good, one can make out part of the serial number on one of the propellers.

"This model is the first one based on a pure data cloud, that stitches all that imagery together with data points created by a digital scan, and with the help from a little artificial intelligence, we are seeing the first unbiased view of the wreck," historian and Titanic expert Parks Stephenson told BBC News . “I believe this is a new phase for underwater forensic investigation and examination.”

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Why Titanic continues to captivate more than 100 years after its sinking

The Titanic has intrigued the public from the moment it set sail.

On Sept. 1, 1985, the wreckage of the Titanic was found on the ocean floor, decades after the ship struck an iceberg and sank in the Atlantic.

The doomed ocean liner has intrigued the public from that moment and throughout the century-plus since.

Most recently, a submersible that catastrophically imploded while on a voyage to see the Titanic wreckage in June highlighted a high-risk, experimental and exclusive tourism opportunity to see the wreckage.

Visits to the underwater site have been conducted in recent decades to retrieve artifacts, study the Titanic's gradual decay and simply lay eyes on the storied shipwreck, which has inspired a wealth of novels, plays, TV shows and films.

"The Titanic has basically been in popular culture since the night it sank," Robert Thompson, founding director of the Bleier Center for Television and Popular Culture at Syracuse University, told ABC News, who noted that the first movie about the Titanic -- a silent film -- was released a month after it sank but has since been lost.

Other notable works that have referenced the Titanic that Thompson mentioned off the top of his head include Noel Coward's 1931 play "Cavalcade" and 1933 Oscar-winning film adaptation; Walter Lord's 1955 non-fiction book "A Night to Remember," which spawned an ambitious live television play in 1956 and a docudrama film two years later; the 1960 musical "The Unsinkable Molly Brown" and its 1964 film adaptation; Clive Cussler's 1976 novel "Raise the Titanic!," which was adapted into a film in 1980; the 1992 IMAX documentary film "Titanica"; and James Cameron's Oscar-winning 1997 film, "Titanic."

"It is a story that has been continually retold in every decade since it happened," Thompson said, who cited the high-society passengers, the ship's unprecedented speed at the time, the high death toll and claims of being "unsinkable" among the reasons why it's retold over and over again.

"If you went out on the street right now and mentioned other shipwrecks, the ones people remember are those that somehow got converted from history and journalism … to some kind of timeless experience via films, televisions, novels, musicals," Thompson said. "They were all important stories, but how they're remembered depends on how they were packaged."

MORE: Missing Titanic submersible live updates

One of the reasons why the Titanic has become so famous is that news of its sinking spread quickly, according to Ole Varmer, a senior fellow with The Ocean Foundation.

"The sinking of Titanic coincides with telegraph services. The Marconi wireless was on Titanic," Varmer told ABC News. "This was probably the first wreck that had a large number of people die, many of them famous and rich, and that news spread around the world because of telegraphs."

The night of the sinking is considered "one of the great moments in the early history of radio," Thompson said. "It was a massive, massive story of the 20th century, which had plenty of stories."

'It's really hard not to get passionate about the ship'

There have been several moments since its sinking that led to a resurgence in interest in the ship, Titanic historian and Philadelphia attorney Craig Sopin noted -- including its discovery in 1985 when it was found sitting in two pieces on the ocean floor more than 2 miles below the surface.

Cameron's 1997 blockbuster and the 100th anniversary of the sinking in 2012 have been other key moments, he said.

"Most people have a Titanic story that goes like this: I watched a movie. I read a book, something like that," Sopin told ABC News.

Sopin said he personally was pulled in as a child by "an old headline in a newspaper" and later purchased an autograph from Millvina Dean, the last living survivor of the Titanic -- the first of some 400 pieces of Titanic memorabilia he has gone on to collect.

"Each time I got something new, I learned a little something new about the ship and it kept pulling me in each time," Sopin said. "I've learned that Titanic goes out in so many different directions -- the building of the ship, the advertising, the ship itself, the passengers, the crew, wireless radio, the postal carriers. I mean, just so many different intriguing stories, that it's really hard not to get passionate about the ship."

Sopin is also a trustee of the Titanic International Society, which preserves the history and advances research on the ship.

"We already know the Titanic hit an iceberg and went down, but there's so much more to learn about it almost every day, something new gets revealed about the ship, or its passengers or the crew," Sopin said.

Michael Poirier, another trustee with the Titanic International Society, told ABC News he recently found two survivor accounts published at the time in British newspapers by searching through online archives. In one of them, Joseph Duquemin recounted jumping overboard in the "dreadful disaster" and swimming to a boat, where he was saved. His friend, meanwhile, drowned.

"There were 712 survivors, and each one has a story," Poirier said.

Preserving the wreckage

Public interest in the Titanic has helped lead to its preservation, according to Varmer, who while a lawyer at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration played a leading role in the negotiation of the Agreement Concerning the Shipwrecked Vessel RMS Titanic in the 1990s.

The international agreement stems from the recommendation made by the U.S. Congress in the RMS Titanic Maritime Memorial Act of 1986, signed into law a year after the wreckage was found, to "address looting, unwanted salvage, and other activities directed at RMS Titanic and to increase protection of the wreck site," according to NOAA.

"It's pretty impressive for the U.S. Congress to act within a year to protect a British flag vessel on the slope of Canada's continental shelf under the high seas," Varmer said. "Enough of the public cared to make Congress care."

Additional legislation has passed further protecting the wreck site. And as of April 15, 2012 -- 100 years after its sinking -- the Titanic came under the 2001 UNESCO Convention on the Protection of the Underwater Cultural Heritage, according to NOAA.

"How many laws are there on just one shipwreck?" Varmer said. "It's because it's like nothing else in the world. It's got a special place."

"This periodically catches people's attention for I think a number of reasons -- it's man against nature, man against man, and thinking about the stories that we want to preserve and pass on to future generations, and I think this is one of those stories," he said.

MORE: A timeline of the missing Titanic tourist submersible

Tours to the titanic.

It is unclear how long the Titanic will remain intact at the bottom of the ocean. By one estimate, UNESCO has said it is expected to disappear by 2050.

Research expeditions to the site have been ongoing since its discovery, while tourism opportunities are a more fledging -- and luxury -- opportunity.

OceanGate, the company behind the submersible that went missing for several days in June before U.S. Coast Guard officials determined it had imploded, had been offering expeditions to the wreck in its five-person submersible to document the rate of decay. It also offered "citizen explorers" the chance to travel to the Titanic to the tune of roughly $250,000, before suspending all exploration and commercial operations in the wake of the Titan implosion. Its CEO, Stockton Rush, was among the five passengers killed in the implosion.

For some, the novel opportunity has been cited as a reason they went on the dangerous expedition.

"The Simpsons" writer Mike Reiss went on an OceanGate expedition last year. He told ABC News it was his wife's dream and they planned it for her birthday, though she tested positive for COVID-19 and was unable to go.

"I do a podcast called 'What Am I Doing Here?'" he told ABC News in June. "I have a wife who loves to travel and I love my wife, and if I want to have a vacation with her, it has to be in North Korea or at the North Pole or at the Titanic."

In September 2000, Michael Guillen, a trained physicist and then-science editor for ABC News, was invited on an expedition run by a group of Russians to be the first journalist in history to make the journey to report at the wreckage site.

"I couldn't say no, even though I had a great fear of water," Guillen told ABC News in June.

During the expedition, his submersible got stuck in the propeller of the Titanic, and Guillen truly thought he would die down there before the pilot managed to maneuver his way out. Guillen recalled telling Barbara Walters on "20/20" that, given the risk, he likely wouldn't recommend it to private citizens.

"I did it because I got this invitation to be the first correspondent in history to go down and report from the Titanic. And what correspondent worth his salt would turn that invitation down," he said.

MORE: Stuck in the propeller of Titanic, former ABC News science editor recalls submersible trip to wreckage

Guillen said it was a "fascinating experience" but emphasized the "real risk" a trip like that entails -- even if it is labeled as a tourist experience.

"This is not Disneyland," he said. "This is the real world. Mother Nature is very unforgiving."

Sopin said he has had multiple opportunities to go on Titanic expeditions -- not with OceanGate -- though turned them down because he wasn't sure if he would become claustrophobic in the tiny vessels. What becomes of the industry in the wake of the OceanGate incident remains unclear.

"I'm almost certain that if they don't determine what the problem is here that I don't know how vigorous the tourist industry for Titanic is going to be," Sopin said.

ABC News' Sam Sweeney and Gio Benitez contributed to this report.

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The Titanic brought them together, and a tiny vessel could doom them

It was early 2019, and aerospace engineer Stockton Rush was racing against the clock. The wreckage of the Titanic was slowly decaying — ravaged by metal-eating bacteria , researchers found — and Rush felt there was suddenly a “pressing need to document the world’s most famous shipwreck, combined with a huge demand of people who wanted to go see it.”

“It made perfect sense,” Rush, the CEO of OceanGate Expeditions, told the German broadcaster Deutsche Welle. “We just had to make the submersible to get there.”

The carbon-fiber submersible his team built, known as the Titan, differentiated itself from similar vessels in part because it had room for at least four “affluent travelers,” including an expert. “If you’re going to take somebody to go see the Titanic,” he said, “it’s going to be the most life-changing experience for them. They won’t want to do it alone.”

Follow live updates on the missing Titanic submersible here

Four years later, Rush and four other men, united by their shared zeal for adventure and the financial resources to chase after it, converged on St. John’s, Newfoundland, for the start of their voyage to survey the remnants of a luxury cruise liner that sank 111 years ago. It was the OceanGate submersible's third trip to the remains of the Titanic, with a fare of $250,000 per traveler.

The five-person crew started a dive Sunday morning from the Polar Prince, a Canadian research vessel. The Polar Prince lost contact with the Titan an hour and 45 minutes later.

The passengers are now at the center of a much higher-stakes race against the clock — a frantic international search-and-rescue effort that must succeed before the 22-foot vessel runs out of oxygen Thursday morning.

The passengers are Rush, who lives in Seattle and served as the vessel’s pilot; Hamish Harding, a British tycoon who lives in the United Arab Emirates; Shahzada Dawood and his son Suleman, scions of a Pakistani business dynasty; and the French mariner and Titanic expert Paul Henry “P.H.” Nargeolet, who has been nicknamed “Mr. Titanic.” 

The men are likely bound together forever, no matter what happens next.

‘ You are not coming back’

Harding, the founder of a UAE-based firm called Action Aviation and a self-described “explorer and adventurer,” appeared to have been driven by a hunger to see the world in all its extremes. (Harding’s family, as well as the immediate families of the other passengers, declined interview requests this week.)

He was a passenger last year on the fifth human spaceflight of Blue Origin, the private space company founded by Amazon mogul Jeff Bezos. In the dark expanse of space, he later told an interviewer , he got an opportunity to “see the world from a different perspective.”

The year before, Harding ventured down to the Mariana Trench in the western Pacific Ocean, 35,000 feet under the sea. He and an American explorer, Victor Vescovo, broke a Guinness World Record for the “longest time spent traversing the deepest part of the ocean on a single dive,” at 4 hours 15 minutes, according to a citation.

Harding was looking for new species and evidence of human pollution, according to news reports from the time. “I want this expedition to contribute to our shared knowledge and understanding of planet Earth,” he told the Khaleej Times , an English-language newspaper published in Dubai. 

But he was clear-eyed about the perils of his 7-mile journey to the furthest depths of the ocean, known as Challenger Deep. “If something goes wrong,” he told the Indian magazine The Week , “you are not coming back.”

The former NASA astronaut Terry Virts is one of Harding’s friends and texted with him shortly before he left on his trip. Harding did not seem nervous about the expedition, Virts recalled.

“If you’re going down to the Titanic, there’s risks,” Virts told NBC News’ Tom Costello. “I wouldn’t call him worried. I would say he was aware.”

Shahzada Dawood, 48, and his 19-year-old son, Suleman, a university student, happened to board the Titan over a weekend when parts of the world celebrated Father’s Day. In an undated photo shared with NBC News, the father and son can be seen smiling widely as the sun sets in the background.

The elder Dawood hails from one of Pakistan’s wealthiest families. The family’s namesake business empire, Dawood Hercules Corp., has investments in agriculture, the health sector and other industries. Shahzada is the vice chairman of the Karachi-based Engro Corporation.

Sikander Hazir, a Dawood family spokesman, said in a statement Tuesday that Shahzada and his wife, Christine, have two children as well as a dog named Stig. Shahzada serves as an adviser to Prince’s Trust International, a charitable organization founded by King Charles III. (Shahzada’s father, Hussain, was one of the trust’s founding patrons.)

“Prince’s Trust International has a longstanding relationship with Shahzada Dawood and his family,” Will Straw, the organization’s CEO, said in a statement. “We are shocked by this awful news, praying for a rescue and sending our thoughts to his family during this deeply challenging time.”

In a phone interview Wednesday, a close friend of Shahzada who has known him since high school described him as a reserved and introverted man who enjoyed taking ambitious excursions, including a 2018 trip to Antarctica and a journey through Africa’s Kalahari Desert in December.

Muhammad Hashim, 48, a business owner who lives in Lahore, said he last spoke to Shahzada on Thursday. Dawood was in Ontario, where he was preparing to board a flight to Newfoundland. Hashim was not aware that his son was there, too.

“He wasn’t nervous at all,” Hashim said of the elder Dawood.

Shahzada’s resume hints at an interest in reaching the unknown. He sits on the board of trustees for the California-based SETI Institute, an organization that searches for signs of extraterrestrials and intelligent life in the universe. He also has a keen interest in Titanic lore and frequently visits museum exhibitions featuring artifacts from the wreckage, according to Hashim.

Shahzada’s older sister , Azmeh, recalled that Shahzada was “absolutely obsessed” with the Titanic from a young age. When they were kids in Pakistan, the Dawood siblings would constantly watch the 1958 film “A Night to Remember,” a British drama about the sinking of the cruise liner.

She recounted that when Shahzada met her husband, he asked if they could sit down and watch a four-hour documentary about the Titanic.

Shahzada’s longtime friend is trying to remain hopeful. “I hope there’s a happy outcome,” Hashim said, “but I have no idea what to say at the moment. We are keeping our fingers crossed, and that’s it.”

‘We didn’t know what we would discover’

No one aboard the OceanGate submersible knows more about the Titanic than Paul Henry Nargeolet, a former French Navy officer and maritime expert commonly identified by the initials “P.H.” He has spent so much time surveying what remains of the world-famous ship that some refer to him by a grand nickname: “Mr. Titanic.”

Nargeolet directs underwater research for E/M Group and RMC Titanic Inc., a U.S. firm that owns the salvage rights to the wreckage and brings treasures from the doomed cruise liner to museum exhibitions around the world. He has completed 37 dives to the Titanic and overseen the recovery of some 5,000 artifacts, according to the company.

He is also no stranger to OceanGate’s Titan vessel. Nargeolet and an Irish oil executive named Oisín Fanning took the Titan more than 9,000 feet under the sea in 2022, discovering an “extraordinarily biodiverse abyssal ecosystem on a previously unknown basalt formation near the Titanic,” according to a cached version of the company site .

“We didn’t know what we would discover,” Nargeolet was quoted as saying. “On the sonar, this could have been any number of things, including the potential of it being another shipwreck. I’ve been seeking the chance to explore this large object that appeared on sonar so long ago,” he said. 

“It was amazing to explore this area and find this fascinating volcanic formation teeming with so much life,” Nargeolet added.

The coral-and sponge-covered formation was “provisionally dubbed” the Nargeolet-Fanning Ridge, according to OceanGate’s site.

In an interview with NBC News, David Gallo, a senior adviser at RMS Titanic, described Nargeolet as his “closest friend and colleague,” “the nicest person you ever want to meet” and a model of “calm, competent” wisdom — whether “he’s on the deck of a ship in the middle of a squall” or “sitting in a Parisian cafe.”

Nargeolet’s past statements suggest he would have agreed with Rush’s assessment that expeditions to the Titanic wreckage were urgent, a matter of historical import.

“In 20 years, most of the deck will be collapsed,” Nargeolet told The Associated Press in 2010. “We’ll still have part of the hull, and the heavy engines will be there for 100 years or more … Maybe some beams will still be there, but everything else will be badly decayed.”

But like Harding, Nargeolet was keenly aware of the risks inherent in their undertaking. In the fall of 2009, he testified at a U.S. District Court hearing in Norfolk, Virginia, that revolved around legal guarantees for Titanic artifacts.

Nargeolet spoke about “the extraordinary expense and risks of deep-sea exploration,” an Associated Press reporter wrote. Nargeolet described the deep-sea environment in stark terms: 150-foot-high icebergs that threatened ships, the “harrowing, claustrophobic voyages 12,000-feet down to the wreck through 33-degree Atlantic waters.”

Aaron Newman — a former passenger on the Titan and an investor in OceanGate who knows Rush, Harding and Nargeolet — told NBC’s “TODAY” show Wednesday morning that he chafed at the idea of calling the three men “tourists.” They were seasoned explorers, not “amateurs.”

“These are people that have lived on the edge for a long time,” Newman said.

Daniel Arkin is a national reporter at NBC News.

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A remarkable new view of the Titanic shipwreck is here, thanks to deep-sea mappers

Rachel Treisman

Scientists were able to map the entirety of the shipwreck site, from the Titanic's separated bow and stern sections to its vast debris field. Atlantic/Magellan hide caption

Scientists were able to map the entirety of the shipwreck site, from the Titanic's separated bow and stern sections to its vast debris field.

A deep sea-mapping company has created the first-ever full-sized digital scan of the Titanic, revealing an entirely new view of the world's most famous shipwreck.

The 1912 sinking of the Titanic has captivated the public imagination for over a century. And while there have been numerous expeditions to the wreck since its discovery in 1985, its sheer size and remote position — some 12,500 feet underwater and 400 nautical miles off the coast of Newfoundland, Canada — have made it nearly impossible for anyone to see the full picture.

Until now, that is. Using technology developed by Magellan Ltd., scientists have managed to map the Titanic in its entirety, from its bow and stern sections (which broke apart after sinking) to its 3-by-5-mile debris field.

Newly released footage of a 1986 Titanic dive reveals the ship's haunting interior

The result is an exact "digital twin" of the wreck, media partner Atlantic Productions said in a news release.

"What we've created is a highly accurate photorealistic 3D model of the wreck," 3D capture specialist Gerhard Seiffert says. "Previously footage has only allowed you to see one small area of the wreck at a time. This model will allow people to zoom out and to look at the entire thing for the first time ... This is the Titanic as no one had ever seen it before."

The Titanic site is hard to get to, hard to see and hard to describe, says Jeremy Weirich, the director of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Ocean Exploration program (he's been to the site).

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"Imagine you're at the bottom of the ocean, there's no light, you can't see anything, all you have is a flashlight and that beam goes out by 10 feet, that's it," he says. "It's a desert. You're moving along, you don't see anything, and suddenly there's a steel ship in front of you that's the size of a skyscraper and all you can see is the light that's illuminated by your flashlight."

This new imagery helps convey both that sense of scale and level of detail, Weirich tells NPR.

Magellan calls this the largest underwater scanning project in history: It generated an unprecedented 16 terabytes of data and more than 715,000 still images and 4k video footage.

"We believe that this data is approximately ten times larger than any underwater 3D model that's ever been attempted before," said Richard Parkinson, Magellan founder and CEO.

James Cameron aims to finally put that 'Titanic' door debate to rest, 25 years later

Experts in Titanic history and deep-sea exploration are hailing the model as an invaluable research tool. They believe it could help scientists and historians solve some of the ship's lingering mysteries — and learn more about other underwater sites, too.

Longtime Titanic explorer and analyst Parks Stephenson described the model as a "game changer" in a phone interview with NPR.

"It takes [us] further into new technology that's going to be the standard, I think, not just for Titanic exploration, but all underwater exploration in the future," he adds.

The effort yielded 16 terabytes of data and more than 715,000 still images, in what Magellan calls the largest underwater scanning project ever. Atlantic/Magellan hide caption

The effort yielded 16 terabytes of data and more than 715,000 still images, in what Magellan calls the largest underwater scanning project ever.

A project years in the making, featuring Romeo and Juliet

Explorers and artists have spent decades trying to depict the Titanic wreck, albeit in lower-tech ways.

After Robert Ballard — along with France's Jean-Louis Michel — discovered the site in 1985, he combined all of his photos to form the first photomosaic of the wreck, which showed the ship's bow and was published in National Geographic. Those efforts have been replicated in the years since.

"But the problem with all that is it requires interpretation," Stephenson says. "It requires human interpretation, and there are gaps in the knowledge."

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Flash forward to the summer of 2022. Scientists spent six weeks capturing scans of the site, using technology that Magellan says it had been developing over the course of five years.

The expedition deployed two submersibles, named Romeo and Juliet, some 2.3 miles below the surface to map every millimeter of the wreck site.

They didn't go inside the ship, let alone touch the site, in accordance with existing regulations, and paid their respects to the more than 1,500 victims with a flower laying ceremony.

And they describe the mission as a challenge, with the team fighting bad weather and technical challenges in the middle of the Atlantic.

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James cameron: diving deep, dredging up titanic.

"When we saw the data come in it was all worth it," Seiffert says. "The level of detail we saw and recorded was extraordinary."

The scientists spent months processing and rendering the data to create the "digital twin," which the company says it's looking forward to sharing publicly.

Stephenson saw an early version of the model, when Atlantic Productions brought him on to consult on its validity. So did Ken Marschall, the maritime artist known for his Titanic paintings.

"We've both seen it with our eyes. We've both seen thousands of digital images of the wreck in imagery, moving imagery," Stephenson said. "But we'd never seen the wreck like this. It was different, but at the same time you just knew it was right."

Experts say the model will be a valuable tool for future Titanic research and deep-sea exploration in general. Atlantic/Magellan hide caption

Experts say the model will be a valuable tool for future Titanic research and deep-sea exploration in general.

There's still a lot left to learn about the Titanic

Can there really be that much left to discover about the Titanic, more than 110 years on?

Stephenson says "at the end of the day, none of this matters." But there's a reason people keep visiting and talking about the wreck, he adds, and it's not because of any buried treasure.

"It's fame, I guess," Stephenson says. "People can't get enough of Titanic. And as long as people can't get enough of the Titanic, people will keep going to ... these mysteries."

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Robert ballard: what hidden underwater worlds are left to discover.

In Stephenson's case, it's the unanswered questions that keep drawing him back.

"I've been grinding away at this for a while, and I'm not on a crusade to dismantle the Titanic narrative that has grown since 1912," he says. "But ... I have had enough experience and seen enough evidence that makes me seriously question even some of the most basic aspects of the Titanic story."

One example: Stephenson says there's reason to doubt the long-accepted conclusion that the ship hit the iceberg along its starboard side. He points to a growing body of evidence that suggests it actually grounded briefly on part of the iceberg that was submerged underwater instead.

Just looking at the preliminary modeling has helped Stephenson bring a lot of his evidence and questions into focus — it may be early days, but he says he already has a better understanding of how the ship's stern came to be in such bad shape.

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Stephenson sees this moment as a paradigm shift in underwater archaeology.

"We're essentially getting to the end of the first generation of Titanic research and exploration, and we're getting ready to transition into the next generation," he says. "And I think this tool basically signals a shift from that generation to the next."

Stephenson wants to use the model to document the extent of Titanic exploration up to this point, from Ballard to James Cameron and beyond. He says a "massive project" is underway, and will hopefully result in a scientific paper and online archive. Then, he plans to use the tool to answer whatever questions remain.

There have been "photomosaics" and other renderings of the shipwreck over the decades, but this is the first such 3D model. Atlantic/Magellan hide caption

There have been "photomosaics" and other renderings of the shipwreck over the decades, but this is the first such 3D model.

The Titanic is a gateway into deep ocean exploration

As a maritime archaeologist, Weirich is most interested in what the ship's condition can teach us about how to better preserve deep-sea shipwrecks in general. For example, how has it impacted the environment since it sunk, and how have the visits since its discovery impacted the site?

The Titanic site has been designated as a maritime memorial, which makes preservation even more important. And Weirich says research on everything from its rate of deterioration to the microbial environment can be applied to other such sites worldwide.

Scientists discover fantastical creatures deep in the Indian Ocean

There are estimated to be hundreds of thousands of wrecks in the world, from ancient wooden ships in the Black Sea to World War II vessels in the Gulf of Mexico, Weirich says.

And this kind of technology could play a crucial role in learning more about deep-sea environments in general, from undersea resources to geological features to unknown species.

Weirich says he hopes these images of the Titanic will give people a greater appreciation for the deep ocean, and a better understanding of just how much is left to explore.

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"The story of Titanic and the shipwreck itself is extremely compelling, but it is a gateway for people to understand what we know and don't know about the deep ocean," he adds.

Weirich remembers being personally captivated by those first images of the shipwreck in National Geographic when he was just 10 years old. That sparked his lifelong interest in ocean exploration — and he hopes young people seeing these latest images are inspired too.

• deep sea exploration

TITANIC Expedition 2024

In July 2024, the world’s leading deep ocean imaging experts, oceanographers, scientists, and historians will gather to launch RMS Titanic, Inc.’s first expedition to the wreck site of the RMS Titanic since 2010. This expedition will utilize cutting-edge technology to focus on imaging and high-resolution photography of the site to preserve the Titanic ’s legacy for future generations and scientific study. It will be carried out by ROVs (remotely operated vehicles) to survey the wreck site and debris field. The images captured will reveal important new insights into the condition of the site, areas and artifacts at risk, and contribute to ongoing conservation efforts and educational initiatives already underway.

The mission of the Titanic Expedition 2024 is to utilize the latest technology to continue the important work of surveying the Titanic wreck site, enhancing our understanding of its historical significance, identifying at risk artifacts for safe recovery in future expeditions, protecting and conserving the area for future generations, furthering current scientific study, engaging a world-wide community in discovering and identifying new artifacts and marine life never before seen, and inspiring the next generation of explorers.

Expedition Objectives

• Preserve the existing state of the site digitally.
• Protect the site by comparing to 2010 imaging to determine the impact of the oceans and other expeditions on the site.
• Study the deterioration at the site and the state of the Marconi Wireless Room .
• New areas of the debris field.
• New marine life previously unknown or unseen.
• New areas of deterioration which could provide unobstructed access to the interior of the ship .
• Engage the worldwide community to be involved in the identification/determination of artifacts for future potential recovery.
• Bring the wreck site to the public in exhibitions, classrooms, and immersive experiences through personal computers and mobile devices with unprecedented clarity to see what only a few in the world will ever see first-hand .
• Involvement in carrying the legacy of Titanic forward by continuing the work at the site through education, career paths in science, technology, engineering, arts, deep ocean exploration, digital content, research, and creative storytelling.

The work and contributions of P.H. Nargeolet to our knowledge of the sea, of the Titanic wreck site, and of Titanic ’s passengers and crew through the art of artifact recovery.

RMS Titanic, Inc. is pleased to partner with world-renowned scientists, oceanographers, naval architects, microbial biologists, metallurgists, historians, and other experts for Titanic Expedition 2024. All expeditions to survey and recover artifacts have been a collaborative effort, bringing scientists from many different domains and countries together, united in the goal of studying the wreck site. We are honored to work with the following key individuals in the Titanic Expedition 2024:

Troy Launay

David Gallo, Ph.D.

Rory Golden

Evan Kovacs

Tomasina Ray

C-Innovation

Why do you need to conduct expeditions.

Expeditions allow RMS Titanic, Inc. to fulfill our Mission to preserve the legacy of Titanic and her passengers and crew, not just through artifact recovery, but also through continuous research, imaging, and educational initiatives. Technology is improving at an incredible pace and we are able to do more now than as recently as two years ago. We are committed to bringing the world current and relevant information in innovative and engaging platforms which, unlike the site itself, are accessible to the public and not just a select few. Expeditions allow us to bring the wreck site to the public and meet our responsibility as salvor-in-possession to preserve the site in perpetuity for future generations.

What do you learn from expeditions?

We are committed and passionate about sharing what we learn from our expeditions. The data we collect and the information we uncover spans the scientific, historic, and objects that can be collected, imaged, and analyzed, especially for education and cultural appreciation. However, by utilizing the latest technology and imaging and leveraging the expertise of some of the most respected minds in various fields, the range of domains that benefit from our expeditions to the Titanic wreck site include climate science, marine biology, engineering, geology, geophysics, cinematography, maritime operations, naval science, and public policy as well as the creative arts.

How long does an expedition take?

Our expeditions are deeply researched, planned, and executed to ensure the greatest of care and concern for the safety of our crew, respect for Titanic and the wreck site, and environment. It takes between 2 and 2.5 hours to reach the bottom of the ocean where the Titanic wreck site lies, about 2.5 miles below the surface. The exact length of the expedition depends on the objectives of the mission, the weather conditions, and other factors. The primary objective is the safety of all involved in the expedition.

Can I get updates on what the expedition finds?

We plan to release updates on Titanic Expedition 2024 on a regular basis. We know there is an intense curiosity and interest in this mission worldwide, and we want to fulfill our objective of educating the public about Titanic . The best place to make sure you are among the first to know is by following us on Facebook , Instagram , X , TikTok , and by becoming a Member here .

How often do you do expeditions?

This will be the ninth expedition to Titanic and the first since 2010. To date, we have honorably and respectfully conducted eight expeditions to the wreck site in 1987, 1993, 1994, 1996, 1998, 2000, and 2004. We recovered artifacts from the debris field in seven of those expeditions.

Why are you able to recover artifacts from the wreck site?

The U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia recognized RMS Titanic, Inc. as the exclusive salvor-in-possession of Titanic in 1994. RMS Titanic, Inc. is the only entity able to legally recover artifacts and we take the designation very seriously. As salvor-in-possession, RMS Titanic Inc.’s activities with respect to Titanic must account for the public interest.

Do you sell artifacts?

No, the artifacts we recover are not sold. Our Collections team ensures that they are carefully protected and preserved upon recovery. Then, working with our collections experts, they research the history and lives that might have been tied to the artifact so that those stories can be shared with guests who visit our permanent, touring and virtual exhibitions.  They are also used in our educational programs to provide insightful and meaningful lessons in STEAM.

Should recovered artifacts be given to museums?

Museums can only display a scant number of objects and artifacts at any one time due to many limitations including space, curatorial staff, and other factors. RMS Titanic, Inc. believes it is in the best interest of the public to provide artifacts for display all over the world, which is why RMS Titanic, Inc. makes touring exhibitions of Titanic artifacts available. Our Collections team consists of some of the most respected, talented, and passionate professionally trained museum staff in the world.

Where can I see recovered artifacts?

TITANIC: The Artifact Exhibition provides many opportunities to see permanent collections in Orlando, Florida and Las Vegas, Nevada. Touring exhibitions, which are extensions of the permanent exhibitions, are located throughout the world. Check discovertitanic.com for the latest touring exhibitions.

Are you recovering artifacts in this expedition?

One of the objectives of Titanic Expedition 2024 is to image, research, and engage the community on potential artifacts for future recovery in 2025 We will not recover artifacts on this expedition. The mission of the Titanic Expedition 2024 is to continue the important work of surveying, mapping, and imaging the Titanic wreck site and debris field.

Who will be part of the crew?

What credentials do you need to be a part of the expedition.

There is no singular credential needed to be a part of Titanic Expedition 2024.  Many of the team members have extensive, decorated careers in oceanography, diving, marine sciences, naval military service, and advanced academic degrees but the commonality lies in the commitment and dedication to preserve the legacy of Titanic .

Missing Submersible Vessel Disappears During Dive to the Titanic Wreck Site

Five people were in the submersible, which lost contact with a surface vessel on Sunday morning, the Coast Guard said. A search and rescue mission is underway in the North Atlantic.

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Follow our live coverage of the missing submersible.

Jenny Gross ,  Emma Bubola and Jesus Jiménez

The search area is 900 miles off the U.S. coast.

A submersible craft carrying five people in the area of the Titanic wreck in the North Atlantic has been missing since Sunday, setting off a search and rescue operation by the U.S. Coast Guard.

The Coast Guard confirmed Monday that it was searching for the vessel after the Canadian research ship MV Polar Prince lost contact with a submersible during a dive about 900 miles east of Cape Cod, Mass., on Sunday morning.

“It is a remote area and it is a challenge to conduct a search in that remote area, but we are deploying all available assets to make sure that we can locate the craft and rescue the people on board,” said Rear Admiral John Mauger of the U.S. Coast Guard.

The submersible disappeared in a portion of the ocean with a depth of roughly 13,000 feet. Admiral Mauger said the occupants would theoretically have between 70 to 96 hours of air as of late Monday afternoon.

The submersible is operated by OceanGate Expeditions, a company that offers tours of shipwrecks and underwater canyons. “Our entire focus is on the crew members in the submersible and their families,” a statement on its website said. “We are deeply thankful for the extensive assistance we have received from several government agencies and deep sea companies in our efforts to reestablish contact with the submersible.”

Hamish Harding, the chairman of the aviation company Action Aviation, is among those aboard the missing submersible, according to Mark Butler, the company’s managing director.

In an Instagram post, Mr. Harding indicated that another member of the submersible team was Paul Henry Nargeolet, a French expert on the Titanic. On his Facebook page on Saturday, Mr. Harding wrote that a dive had been planned for Sunday: “A weather window has just opened up,” he wrote.

Here’s what to know about the search operation:

Stockton Rush, the chief executive of OceanGate, has compared its project to the booming space tourism industry. Its customers pay $250,000 to travel to the Titanic’s wreckage on the seabed, more than two miles below the ocean’s surface.

Admiral Mauger said aircraft from the United States and Canada were searching for the submersible, and sonar buoys had been deployed to help search under the surface. The Coast Guard was also coordinating with commercial vessels in the area to aid the search operation.

OceanGate chartered a vessel, the MV Polar Prince, to serve as the ship on the surface near the dive site. The company’s website outlines an eight-day itinerary for the trip out of St. John’s, Newfoundland, Canada.

The Titanic sank in the early hours of April 15, 1912, on its maiden voyage from England to New York after hitting an iceberg, killing more than 1,500 people. The wreckage was found in 1985, broken into two main sections, about 400 miles off Newfoundland, in eastern Canada. Read The Times’s coverage of the sinking.

John Ismay, a Pentagon reporter, served as a deep-sea diving and salvage officer in the U.S. Navy.

Why are undersea rescues so difficult?

Numerous complications could hinder the effort to rescue the five people aboard the deep-diving submersible Titan, which failed to return from a dive on Sunday to the wreck of the Titanic on the floor of the Atlantic Ocean.

For any search and rescue operation at sea, weather conditions, the lack of light at night, the state of the sea and water temperature can all play roles in whether stricken mariners can be found and rescued. For a rescue beneath the waves, the factors involved in a successful rescue are even more numerous and difficult.

The first and most important problem to solve is simply finding the Titan.

Many underwater vehicles are fitted with an acoustic device, often called a pinger, which emits sounds that can be detected underwater by rescuers. Whether Titan has one is unclear.

The submersible reportedly lost contact with its support ship an hour and 45 minutes into what is normally a two-and-a-half-hour dive to the bottom, where the Titanic lies.

There could be a problem with Titan’s communication equipment, or with the ballast system that controls its descent and ascent by flooding tanks with water to dive and pumping water out with air to come back toward the surface.

An additional possible hazard for the vessel would be becoming fouled — hung up on a piece of wreckage that could keep it from being able to return to the surface.

If the submersible is found on the bottom, the extreme depths involved limit the possible means for rescue.

Human divers wearing specialized equipment and breathing helium-rich air mixtures can safely reach depths of just a few hundred feet below the surface before having to spend long amounts of time decompressing on the way back up. A couple hundred feet deeper, light from the sun can no longer penetrate the water, and dark reigns.

The Titanic lies in about 14,000 feet of water in the North Atlantic, a depth that humans can reach only while inside specialized submersibles that keep their occupants warm, dry and supplied with breathable air.

The only likely rescue would come from an uncrewed vehicle — essentially an underwater drone. The U.S. Navy has one submarine rescue vehicle , although it can reportedly reach depths of just 2,000 feet. For recovering objects off the sea floor in deeper water, the Navy relies on what it calls remote-operated vehicles, such as the one it used to salvage a crashed F-35 Joint Strike Fighter in about 12,400 feet in the South China Sea in early 2022. That vehicle, called CURV-21 , can reach depths of 20,000 feet.

Getting the right kind of equipment — such as a remote vehicle like the CURV-21 — to the site takes time, starting with getting it to a ship capable of delivering it to the site.

The Titanic’s wreck lies approximately 370 miles south of Newfoundland, and the kinds of ships that can carry a vehicle like the Navy’s deepest-diving robot normally move no faster than about 20 miles per hour.

According to OceanGate’s website, the Titan can keep its five occupants alive for approximately 96 hours. In many submersibles, the air inside is recycled — carbon dioxide is removed and oxygen is added — but on a long enough timeline, the vessel will lose the ability to scrub enough carbon dioxide, and the air inside will no longer sustain life.

If the Titan’s batteries run down and are no longer able to run heaters that keep the occupants warm in the freezing deep, the people inside can become hypothermic and the situation eventually becomes unsurvivable. Should the submersible’s pressure hull fail, the end for those inside would be certain and quick.

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OceanGate Expeditions was created to explore deep waters.

OceanGate Expeditions, the owner of the missing submersible, is a privately owned company headquartered in Everett, Wash., that, since its founding in 2009, has focused on increasing access to deep-ocean exploration.

The company has made headlines in recent years for organizing expeditions for paying tourists to travel in submersibles to shipwrecks, including the Titanic, and to underwater canyons. According to the company’s website , OceanGate also provides crewed submersibles for commercial projects and scientific research.

“Our team of qualified pilots, expedition leaders, mission professionals and client-service staff ensure accountability throughout the entire mission and expedition process with a focus on safety, proactive communication and client satisfaction,” the website reads .

OceanGate was founded by Stockton Rush, an aerospace engineer and pilot, who currently serves as its chief executive officer.

At just 19 years old, in 1981, Mr. Rush became the youngest jet transport rated pilot in the world, and obtained a degree in aerospace engineering from Princeton University three years later, according to the OceanGate website. He later earned an M.B.A. from the Haas School of Business at the University of California, Berkeley, in 1989.

OceanGate currently owns and operates three five-person submersibles.

The first submersible acquired by OceanGate, Antipodes, could travel to a depth of 1,000 feet.

In 2012, the company acquired another submersible, and rebuilt it into Cyclops 1, a vessel that could travel to a depth of up to 1,640 feet. It served as a prototype for the newest submersible, the Titan. That vessel, made of carbon fiber and titanium, is engineered to reach depths of more than 13,000 feet, or more than two miles. The Titan, which has been used to explore the Titanic’s wreckage, is now missing .

OceanGate has provided tours of the Titanic since 2021, in which guests have paid up to $250,000 to travel to the wreckage, which lies about 12,500 feet below the ocean’s surface.

Last year, Mr. Rush described the business to CBS News as “very unusual,” providing “a new type of travel.”

The company first planned a voyage to the Titanic in 2018, according to the technology news site GeekWire , but the Titan sustained damage to its electronics from lightning. Then, in 2019, the voyage was postponed again because of a problem with complying with Canadian maritime law limitations on foreign flag vessels, according to GeekWire .

Before the first successful trip to the Titanic in 2021, the Titan was “rebuilt,” according to GeekWire , after tests showed signs of “cyclic fatigue” that reduced the hull’s depth rating to 3,000 meters.

In 2020, OceanGate announced that it was working with NASA ’s Marshall Space Flight Center to assure that the submersible was strong enough to survive in the ocean’s depths.

According to the company’s website, OceanGate has successfully completed more than 14 expeditions and more than 200 dives in the Pacific, Atlantic and the Gulf of Mexico.

OceanGate’s board members include Mr. Rush, along with a physician and astronaut, a software consultant, a retired U.S. Coast Guard, and a C.E.O. of an investment advisory firm.

In addition to OceanGate, Mr. Rush is also a co-founder and member of the board of trustees of OceanGate Foundation , a nonprofit organization founded in 2012 which aims to “fuel underwater discoveries in nautical archaeology, marine sciences and subsea technology” through public outreach and financial support.

The nonprofit’s website features OceanGate’s Titanic expedition, along with other global exploration expeditions.

OceanGate is based on the backside of a marina facility in Everett, Wash., tucked between several boat maintenance companies, where some workers were washing, inspecting and relocating yachts on Monday. No sign or logo marks its location, and the windows at the OceanGate doors were covered on Monday, one with a Titanic expedition logo. The entrance door was locked, and nobody responded to knocking. A nearby marina worker said OceanGate employees packed up and left for the Titanic expedition several weeks ago.

Andrea Kannapell

An Instagram post from Hamish Harding, who was aboard the submersible that went missing on Sunday, indicated that another member of the submersible team was Paul Henry Nargeolet, a French expert on the Titanic.

Emma Bubola ,  Salman Masood and Victoria Kim

Here is who was on the missing submersible.

Five people were on board the Titan submersible when it lost contact with its support ship during a dive to the Titanic wreckage site in the North Atlantic on Sunday. On Thursday, the U.S. Coast Guard and the company that operated the submersible, OceanGate Expeditions, said that all five people on board were believed to be dead.

Here are the passengers who were aboard the craft.

Stockton Rush

Stockton Rush was the founder and chief executive of OceanGate Expeditions, the company that operated the submersible. He was piloting the vessel.

In an interview that aired on CBS in November, Mr. Rush said he grew up wanting to be an astronaut and, after earning an aerospace engineering degree from Princeton in 1984, a fighter pilot.

“I had this epiphany that I didn’t want — it wasn’t about going to space,” Mr. Rush said. “It was about exploring. It was about finding new life-forms. I wanted to be sort of the Captain Kirk. I didn’t want to be the passenger in the back. And I realized that the ocean is the universe.” He founded OceanGate, a private company that is based in Everett, Wash., near Seattle, in 2009.

Read his obituary here .

Hamish Harding

Hamish Harding , a British businessman and explorer, holds several Guinness World Records, including one for the longest time spent traversing the deepest part of the ocean on a single dive. He wrote on his Facebook page on Saturday that he was proud to announce that he had joined OceanGate’s mission “on the sub going down to the Titanic.”

Mr. Harding, 58, was the chairman of Action Aviation, a sales and air operations company based in Dubai. He had previously flown to space on a mission by Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin rocket company.

Mr. Harding also took part in an effort to reintroduce cheetahs to India, and holds a world record for the fastest circumnavigation of Earth via both the geographic poles by plane.

Paul-Henri Nargeolet

Paul-Henri Nargeolet , a French maritime expert, had been on more than 35 dives to the Titanic wreck site.

Mr. Nargeolet was the director of underwater research for RMS Titanic, Inc. , an American company that owns the salvage rights to the famous wreck and displays many of the artifacts in Titanic exhibitions. The company conducted eight research and recovery expeditions between 1987 and 2010, according to its website.

Shahzada Dawood and Suleman Dawood

The British-Pakistani businessman Shahzada Dawood , 48, and his son, Suleman, 19, were members of one of Pakistan’s wealthiest families.

Mr. Dawood had a background in textiles and fertilizer manufacturing. His son was a business student at the University of Strathclyde in Glasgow, a spokesman for the school confirmed in a statement on Thursday.

Mr. Dawood and his son had “embarked on a journey to visit the remnants of the Titanic” when contact with the vessel was lost, the statement said, asking for privacy for the family.

Mr. Dawood was also on the board of trustees for the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence Institute. The organization said on its website that he was a resident of Britain, and a father of two children.

April Rubin

‘Digital twin’ of the Titanic shows the shipwreck in extraordinary detail.

An ambitious digital imaging project has produced what researchers describe as a “digital twin” of the R.M.S. Titanic, showing the wreckage of the doomed ocean liner with a level of detail that has never been captured before.

The project, undertaken by Magellan Ltd., a deepwater seabed mapping company, yielded more than 16 terabytes of data, 715,000 still images and a high-resolution video. The visuals were captured over the course of a six-week expedition in the summer of 2022, nearly 2.4 miles below the surface of the North Atlantic, Atlantic Productions, which is working on a documentary about the project, said in a news release.

The researchers used two submersibles, named Romeo and Juliet, to map “every millimeter” of the wreckage as well as the entire three-mile debris field. Creating the model, which shows the ship lying on the ocean floor and the area around it, took about eight months, said Anthony Geffen, the chief executive and creative director of Atlantic Productions.

Jesus Jiménez

A Coast Guard admiral says rescue crews are ‘making the best use of every moment.’

By air and sea, rescue crews on Monday were racing to find five people in a submersible that went missing on Sunday just hours into a dive about 900 miles east of Cape Cod, Mass., officials said.

At a news conference in Boston on Monday afternoon, Rear Adm. John Mauger of the U.S. Coast Guard said that rescue crews were searching in a “remote area” in water roughly 13,000 feet deep, and that they were up against the clock to find those on board the vessel.

Admiral Mauger said that Coast Guard officials understood from OceanGate Expeditions, the operator of the submersible, which offers tours of shipwrecks and underwater canyons, that the vessel was designed to have 96 hours of “emergency capability.” He did not provide specifics about what that capability meant for those on board, though it was believed to indicate that they would have breathable air for four days.

“We’re using that time, making the best use of every moment of that time,” he said.

The five people on board the submersible were not identified at the news conference “out of respect for the families,” Admiral Mauger said, noting that one person on board was a pilot, or operator, and that the other four were “mission specialists.” He did not share what role the specialists served on the vessel, referring that question to the operator of the submersible.

The United States deployed two C-130 aircraft, with another aircraft expected to join the search later on Monday from the New York National Guard, and Canada has sent a C-130 and a P-8 submarine search aircraft, Admiral Mauger said.

“On the surface we have the commercial operator that’s been on site, and we’re bringing additional surface assets into play,” he said, adding that they will provide some “subsurface” search ability.

Admiral Mauger said that rescue teams had also deployed sonar buoys on the surface of the waters to try to locate the submersible, which had sent out its last reported communication about an hour and 45 minutes into its dive. Exactly when that was on Sunday morning was unclear.

In an interview with Fox News earlier on Monday, Admiral Mauger said that the Coast Guard did not have the right equipment in the search area to do a “comprehensive sonar survey of the bottom.”

“Right now, we’re really just focused on trying to locate the vessel again by saturating the air with aerial assets,” he said.

Christine Chung

To the bottom of the sea and the ends of the earth, high-risk travel is booming.

Plunging to the depths of the ocean in a submersible to explore the remains of the Titanic is just one of many extreme excursions on offer for travelers willing to pay a hefty price tag — and accept a substantial dose of peril.

There’s also swimming with great white sharks in Mexico, sailing by an active volcano in New Zealand and rocketing to space . These types of singular and dangerous adventures are becoming increasingly popular with deep-pocketed leisure travelers in search of novel experiences, several travel experts said.

“There are a lot of incredibly well-traveled folks out there who constantly push the boundaries of their travels to chase thrills and claim bragging rights,” said Peter Anderson, managing director of Knightsbridge Circle , a luxury concierge service with offices in London, New York and Dubai. “They’re so accustomed to what they consider to be typical vacations that they begin to seek out more unique experiences, many of which involve a degree of risk.”

Mr. Anderson said he had recently planned a trip for a client to visit the pyramids in South Sudan, the site of one of the world’s biggest refugee crises, which has a “Do Not Travel” advisory from the U.S. State Department. The planning process, he said, involved consultations with security experts on how to best mitigate potential dangers.

Another client wanted to voyage to the geographic South Pole — the southernmost point on Earth — which required chartering an icebreaker, a large vessel that can pass through ice-covered waters, and two helicopters for sightseeing. The trip, which cost about $100,000 per person, required a week of various health screenings and weather preparedness training.

Physically demanding expeditions to some of the world’s most remote destinations are a growing business for the luxury travel company Abercrombie & Kent , said Geoffrey Kent, its founder. He said the company uses expert guides to eliminate as much risk as possible.

“These are thrilling adventures for top-tier clients who have done pretty much everything,” Mr. Kent said in a statement, adding that the challenges left guests “with a sense of accomplishment.”

Perhaps the priciest ticket, and biggest possible risk, is space travel, which has been dominated by a trio of billionaire-led rocket companies: Blue Origin , owned by Jeff Bezos, whose passengers have included the “Star Trek” television star William Shatner; Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic , where tickets for a suborbital spaceflight start at $450,000; and Elon Musk’s SpaceX , which in 2022 launched an all-civilian spaceflight, with no trained astronauts on board.

A spokesman for the U.S. Coast Guard, speaking to reporters, said that the last reported communication from the submersible was about an hour and 45 minutes into its dive.

The spokesman said that the sea conditions in the search area right now are “fairly normal,” with three to six foot waves, with low visibility and fog.

Mauger said that the United States has deployed two C130 aircraft, with an additional on the way from the New York National Guard, and that the Canadians have sent a C130 and a P8 submarine search aircraft. “On the surface we have the commercial operator that’s been on site, and we’re bringing additional surface assets into play,” he said, adding that they will provide some “subsurface” search ability.

Mauger said that one submersible pilot was on board. “And there were four mission specialists, is the term that the operator uses,” he said. “You’ll have to ask the operator what that means.”

Jesus Jimenez

Mauger said it is believed the vessel was designed to sustain an emergency for 96 hours and estimated that the people inside would theoretically have between 70 to 96 hours of air. “We’re using that time making the best use of every moment of that time,” Mauger said.

Mauger said the location of the search is approximately 900 miles east of Cape Cod, Mass., in a water depth of roughly 13,000 feet. “It is a remote area and is a challenge to conduct a search in that remote area, but we are deploying all available assets to make sure that we can locate the craft and rescue the people on board.”

Mauger said that the search is being conducted both under the water, with sonar buoys and sonar on the expedition ship, and over the water, in case the submersible surfaced and lost communications, with the help of aircraft and surface vessels. He said the Coast Guard was coordinating both with the Canadian authorities and commercial vessels in the area for help.

Mauger said the Coast Guard was notified on Sunday afternoon by the operator of the submersible that it was “overdue” and that it had five people on board.

Rear Admiral John Mauger of the U.S. Coast Guard said at a news conference that “we are doing everything we can do” to find the submersible and rescue the five people inside. United States and Canadian aircraft are being used in the search, he said. Mauger said that the Coast Guard has put sonar buoys in the water to try to locate the submersible.

We’re standing by for Rear Admiral John Mauger of the U.S. Coast Guard to provide updates on the missing submersible at a news conference in Boston.

Ben Shpigel

The Titan is equipped with only a few days’ worth of life support.

The Titan , the vessel that went missing in the area of the Titanic wreck in the North Atlantic on Monday, is classified as a submersible, not a submarine, because it does not function as an autonomous craft, instead relying on a support platform to deploy and return.

According to the website for the tourism company operating the Titan, OceanGate Expeditions of Everett, Wash., the missing vessel is a submersible capable of taking five people — one pilot and four crew members — to depths of 4,000 meters, or more than 13,100 feet — for “site survey and inspection, research and data collection, film and media production, and deep sea testing of hardware and software.”

Made of titanium and carbon fiber, it weighs about 21,000 pounds and is listed as measuring 22 feet by 9.2 feet by 8.3 feet, with 96 hours of “life support” for five people.

The Titan, one of three types of crewed submersibles operated by OceanGate, is equipped with a platform similar to the dry dock of a ship that launches and recovers the vessel, the website said.

“The platform is used to launch and recover manned submersibles by flooding its flotation tanks with water for a controlled descent to a depths of 9.1 meters (30 feet) to avoid any surface turbulence,” according to the website.

“Once submerged, the platform uses a patented motion-dampening flotation system to remain coupled to the surface yet still provide a stable underwater platform from which our manned submersibles lift off of and return to after each dive,” the site continues. “At the conclusion of each dive, the sub lands on the submerged platform and the entire system is brought to the surface in approximately two minutes by filling the ballast tanks with air.”

OceanGate calls the Titan the only crewed submersible in the world that can take five people as deep as 4,000 meters — or more than 13,100 feet — enabling it to reach almost 50 percent of the world’s oceans. Unlike other submersibles, the Titan, the website said, employs a system that can analyze how pressure changes affect the vessel as it dives deeper, providing “early warning detection for the pilot with enough time to arrest the descent and safely return to surface.”

The Titan began deep-sea ventures related to the Titanic in 2021. According to the tech news site GeekWire , the vessel was “rebuilt” after OceanGate determined through testing that the vessel could not withstand the pressure of a 4,000-meter dive.

In a Fox News interview, Rear Admiral John Mauger of the U.S. Coast Guard said that the agency did not have the right equipment in the search area to do a “comprehensive sonar survey of the bottom.” He said,“Right now, we’re really just focused on trying to locate the vessel again by saturating the air with aerial assets, by tasking surface assets in the area, and then using the underwater sonar.”

Mauger said that one of the aircraft being used in the search could detect underwater noises.“But it is a large area of water, and it’s complicated by local weather conditions as well,” he said.

The U.S. Coast Guard said in statement that it was searching for five people after the Canadian research vessel MV Polar Prince lost contact with a submersible during a dive about 900 miles east of Cape Cod, Mass., on Sunday morning. The Coast Guard scheduled a news conference for 4:30 p.m. Eastern time.

Jenny Gross

The Marine Institute at the Memorial University of Newfoundland, which partnered with OceanGate on the trip, said in a statement that it became aware on Monday morning that OceanGate had lost contact with its Titan submersible. One Marine Institute student who was on a summer employment contract with OceanGate was safe, the statement said. “We have no further information on the status of the submersible or personnel,” the statement said.

Emma Bubola

Rory Golden, an Irish diver who has previously visited the Titanic wreckage and is part of the OceanGate expedition, said in a Facebook post on Monday that a “major search and rescue operation” was underway. The focus on board the ship is “our friends,” he wrote. Communications were being limited to preserve bandwidth to coordinate operations, he added. (Because of an editing error, an earlier version of this update misstated Rory Golden’s nationality. He is Irish, not Scottish.)

Hamish Harding, the chairman of a Dubai-based sales and air operations company, Action Aviation, is among those aboard the missing submersible, according to Mark Butler, the company’s managing director. Harding, who holds several Guinness World Records, including for the longest time spent traversing the deepest part of the ocean on a single dive, wrote on his Facebook page on Saturday that a dive had been planned for Sunday: “A weather window has just opened up,” he wrote.

Tourists have been going to the Titanic site for decades, by robot or submersible.

For decades after the Titanic sank, searchers scanned the dark waters of the North Atlantic for the ship’s final resting place.

Since the wreck was found, in 1985, it has drawn hundreds of filmmakers, salvagers, explorers and tourists, using robots and submersibles.

First there was the team that took undersea robots to depths of more than 12,000 feet, verifying that the broken hulk it found at the bottom was in fact the Titanic. Then came many others, including James Cameron, the director who reinvigorated interest in the ship with his 1997 film, “ Titanic .”

The ship had long garnered intense interest among researchers and treasure hunters captivated by the tragic history of the wreck: the horror of the accident, the supposed hubris of the ship’s builders, the enormous wealth of many and the poverty of others on the luxury liner juxtaposed with the cold facts of the iceberg and the sea.

But Mr. Cameron’s hit imbued the wreck with a new story of romance and tragedy, renewing interest far beyond those with an interest in famous accidents at sea.

By the early 2000s, scientists were warning that visitors were a threat to the wreck, saying that gaping holes had opened up in the decks, walls had crumpled, and that rusticles — icicle-shaped structures of rust — were spreading all over the ship.

Tourists were paying up to $36,000 per dive by submersible. Salvage crews hunted for artifacts to bring back up, over the objections of preservationists who said the wreck should be honored as the graveyard for more than 1,500 people. Wreckage from a submersible accident was found on one of the Titanic’s decks. Researchers said the site was littered with beer and soda bottles and the remains of salvage efforts, including weights, chains and cargo nets.

Mr. Cameron, who has repeatedly visited the wreck, was among those calling for care around the site. In 2003, he took 3D cameras there for his 2003 documentary, “ Ghosts of the Abyss .”

OceanGate Expeditions, the private company operating the submersible that went missing on Monday, was founded in 2009. By the time it began offering tours to paying customers, researchers said that the Titanic had little scientific value compared to other sites.

But cultural interest in the Titanic remains extraordinarily high: OceanGate charges $250,000 for a submersible tour of the wreck, and the disaster continues to command a fascination online, sometimes at the expense of facts .

A spokeswoman for Canada's Coast Guard said that a military aircraft and a Coast Guard ship had been deployed to help search for the missing submersible. The ship, Kopit Hopson 1752, was off eastern Newfoundland, and headed for the search area.

Dana Rubinstein

John Lockwood, a longtime OceanGate board member, has been in the company’s submersibles, though not the Titan, the one that he said takes people to the Titanic. He said the submersibles have a viewing port and external cameras. “But it’s not like going down in a submarine at a very shallow depth, where there are multiple viewing ports,” he said.

Amanda Holpuch

The tour’s operator charges $250,000 for trips to the sunken wreckage.

OceanGate Expeditions, the operator of the submersible that disappeared during a voyage to the wreckage of the Titanic, has led previous tourist trips to the site at a cost of $250,000 per person.

Stockton Rush, the president of OceanGate, told The New York Times last summer that private exploration was needed to continue feeding public fascination with the wreck site.

“No public entity is going to fund going back to the Titanic,” Mr. Rush said. “There are other sites that are newer and probably of greater scientific value.”

OceanGate takes paying tourists in submersibles to underwater canyons and shipwrecks, including the Titanic. Last year, it shared a one-minute clip of video obtained during one of its trips to the wreck site, which was discovered in 1985, less than 400 miles off Newfoundland.

The dives last about eight hours, including the estimated 2.5 hours each way it takes to descend and ascend. Scientists and historians provide context on the trip and some conduct research at the site, which has become a reef that is home to many organisms. The team also documents the wreckage with high-definition cameras to monitor its decay and capture it in detail.

Mr. Rush said that the high quality of the footage allowed researchers to get an even closer look at the site without having to go underwater. He compared the OceanGate trips to space tourism, saying the commercial voyages were the first step to expanding the use of the submersibles for industrial activities, such as inspecting and maintaining underwater oil rigs.

“For those who think it’s expensive, it’s a fraction of the cost of going to space and it’s very expensive for us to get these ships and go out there,” Mr. Rush said. “And the folks who don’t like anybody making money sort of miss the fact that that’s the only way anything gets done in this world is if there is profit or military need.”

Because of an editing error, an earlier version of this article misstated the day that the expedition’s research vessel lost contact with the submersible. It was Sunday, not Monday.

How we handle corrections

Trevor Munroe, a Canadian Coast Guard spokesman, said his country is involved in the rescue mission, but the U.S. Coast Guard is leading it from Boston. “It’s technically in their waters,” he said.

The news of the missing submersible recalls an OceanGate trip last year that was the subject of a CBS story . During the trip, the CBS correspondent David Pogue reported that “communication somehow broke down”and that the submersible was briefly lost for a couple of hours.

You may remember that the @OceanGateExped sub to the #Titanic got lost for a few hours LAST summer, too, when I was aboard…Here’s the relevant part of that story. https://t.co/7FhcMs0oeH pic.twitter.com/ClaNg5nzj8 — David Pogue (@Pogue) June 19, 2023

The New York Times

Here’s how The New York Times covered the sinking of the Titanic in 1912.

The Titanic was en route to New York on its maiden voyage when it struck an iceberg and sank on April 15, 1912. The sinking was front-page news around the world, including in The New York Times. Here is a portion of The Times’s coverage, as it was written that day. The digital version of the paper from that day can be viewed here .

The admission that the Titanic, the biggest steamship in the world, had been sunk by an iceberg and had gone to the bottom of the Atlantic, probably carrying more than 1,400 of her passengers and crew with her, was made at the White Star Line offices, 9 Broadway, at 8:20 o’clock last night.

Then P.A.S. Franklin, Vice President and General Manager of the International Mercantile Marine, conceded that probably only those passengers who were picked up by the Cunarder Carpathia had been saved. Advices received early this morning tended to increase the number of survivers by 200.

The admission followed a day in which the White Star Line officials had been optimistic in the extreme. At no time was the admission made that every one aboard the huge steamer was not safe. The ship itself, it was confidently asserted, was unsinkable, and inquirers were informed that she would reach port, under her own steam probably, but surely with the help of the Allan liner Virginian, which was reported to be towing her.

As the day passed, however, with no new authentic reports from the Titanic or any of the ships were known to have responded to her wireless call for help, it became apparent that authentic news of the disaster probably could come only from the Titanic’s sister ship, the Olympic.

The wireless range of the Olympic is 500 miles. That of the Carpathia, the Parisian, and the Virginian is much less, and as they neared the position of the Titanic they drew further and further out of shore range. From the Titanic’s position at the time of the disaster it is doubtful if any of the ships except the Olympic could establish communication with shore.

Miawpukek Horizon Maritime Services, of St. John’s, Canada, said it was supporting OceanGate Expeditions, a client. “We are working closely with authorities on the search and rescue effort,” they said in a statement.

Titanic Tours: What To Know About These Underwater Excursions

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It's safe to say that when an iceberg pierced the Titanic on its maiden voyage just over 100 years ago, no one was thinking about turning the shipwreck into a tourist attraction. But now, in celebration of the 100th anniversary of the sinking, some travel companies are offering tours of the site. Visitors can take an expensive excursion or they can simply look on Google, where the wreck is pictured in all its rustic, 3-D glory.

It's a surreal sight ― especially if you know that when the Titanic went down in 1912 it claimed more than 1,500 lives. But is visiting the ship such a good idea? Absolutely, yes!

Package Tours On Titanic Shipwreck Underwater Excursions

There are now two companies offering underwater tours of the Titanic's wreckage. Bluefish and OceanGate, which has its headquarters in Everett Washington, both offer dives to the site that cost roughly $60,000- $105,129 per person, not including airfare or lodging. But what do you get for this price? Here's what to know about the tours:

Now that the wreckage is covered with silt again and no longer clear enough for photographs, some pictures taken on previous dives have been reproduced on tours' brochures. Up-close views of Titanic's exterior can also be seen in the James Cameron documentary Titanic.

Bluefish's brochures claim that "the wreck is eminently photographable providing an opportunity for multiple dive photography." OceanGate's website notes that there are at least a dozen friezes from the ship above water. Both tour companies are adamant about protecting the site and the body of water around it, possibly due to the controversy that arose last year when one company was using a ship to drop tourists onto the wreckage.

A Bluefish video demonstrates what it's like inside the sub by dropping a GoPro camera into an empty one as well as dead still sharks. It also shows some footage of Titanic itself before it was covered up with silt and debris.

Tourists will use OceanGate's custom-built submersibles made out of titanium, not unlike those used for space missions like Apollo 13. The sub is big enough for three passengers and has a window, touchscreen monitors for navigation, a pressure gauge, and all the equipment that tourists will need to live.

Both companies will take precautions like deploying a safety diver. They also plan to check guests' lungs for signs of pneumonia before each dive to ensure that they are healthy enough.

The Titanic sank in 1912 and many people died, but the wreck was never declared a cemetery or war gravesite, so knocking on it is prohibited. Both companies also request that tourists don't take chunks of the ship as souvenirs, which has happened before with other famous wrecks like the Lusitania.

RELATED:   This Is What The Menu On The Titanic Would Have Looked Like, Compared To Cruise Menus Today

5 Things To Take Note About the Titanic Wreck Site

Once you’ve decided on which company to go through to visit this sunken piece of history, the basic accommodations are all set! While the entire site itself is a historical wonder, there are a few things to note. Below are different things to be aware of before you take a dive.

What To Bring With You When Visiting The Underwater Wreckage

According to Blue Marble Private, divers should bring nothing larger than a handbag with them on the excursion. Their kit will include a snorkel plus mask, computer, and regulator, wetsuit, and boots.

What To Expect When Diving At The Site Of The Titanic Wreck

Divers will be able to explore the three most important parts of the wreckage, including its bow section, stern and engine room. Each area has plenty of marine life, so you might feel as though you're swimming through a fishbowl.

RELATED:   What Really Happened To The Titanic's Captain, And Did He Survive Like Some People Claimed?

What To Know When Diving At The Site Of The Titanic Wreck

Dive trips are run with a maximum of 12 divers at one time, and the company cautions that diving can be strenuous if you're not fit or healthy enough for it. This is why they recommend medical checks before each excursion.

What Not To Do When Visiting The Underwater Wreckage Of The Titanic

You must report any sightings of the wreck to the government agencies responsible for its protection, i.e., the Maritime and Coast Guard Agency (MCA) in Belfast. You should also respect all regulations that surround this precious archeological site.

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What To Expect From The Marine Life At The Site Of The Titanic Wreck

Titanic wreck excursions are perfect for snorkelers and scuba divers alike , and visitors will be able to reap the benefits of both in one visit. There are plenty of fish to see if you're snorkeling, and you might even spot some whale sharks, too.

What To Know About The Safety Measures In Place For The Tour

According to the Titanic wreck tour operator's website, there are a number of safety measures in place to ensure that visitors have an enjoyable experience. These include two divers per dive, a support crew on the surface, and medical staff. Visitors should always bring a whistle with them, especially since it is an international sign of distress. A knife and glow stick will also be useful in an emergency.

Titanic wreck trips are a unique and exciting way to learn about the history of one of the most famous vessels to ever sail the seas, which is why they're so popular among Titanic enthusiasts as well as people who have never seen it before. They're also great for anyone who loves the water since it's a chance to explore something man-made while enjoying the natural beauty of an underwater ecosystem. The fact that you can set foot where no other human has for nearly 100 years only adds to the appeal, making this one of the most fascinating excursions you can take.

NEXT:   What The Titanic Looks Like Now Vs The Day It Sank

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The Titan’s implosion: the latest news on the Titanic wreckage tourist sub

By Wes Davis , a weekend editor who covers the latest in tech and entertainment. He has written news, reviews, and more as a tech journalist since 2020.

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On June 18th, 2023, a small sub called the Titan was lost about an hour and forty-five minutes into its voyage carrying five people on a tourist visit to the wreckage of the Titanic. After days of searching in the North Atlantic, the Coast Guard confirmed it found debris showing the sub suffered a “catastrophic implosion.”

The US Coast Guard had been searching beneath the ocean floor with remotely-operated vehicles (ROVs) while sonar — from planes overhead, buoys on the surface, and expedition ships — pinged the bottom of the ocean looking for signs of the sub.

However, on June 22nd, the Coast Guard reported an ROV found debris from the Titan about 1,600 feet from the bow of the Titanic. This led search crews to believe that the sub imploded shortly after its departure, killing all five passengers.

The sub carried 58-year-old British billionaire Hamish Harding, who flew on a Blue Origin suborbital flight in June 2022, Pakistani billionaire Shahzada Dawood and his son, Suleman Dawood, a 77-year-old French explorer named Paul-Henry Nargeolet, and the CEO of OceanGate, Stockton Rush, who was 61 years old.

The Titan was a small, five-person submersible that is designed to reach depths of 4,000 meters “for site survey and inspection, research and data collection, film and media production, and deep sea testing of hardware and software,” according to its operator OceanGate .

On the inside , it was little more than a tube with a single viewport, a small toilet, touchscreens for viewing sonar and controlling the sub, as well as a screen for viewing the external 8K camera’s feed. The “experimental vessel” was also controlled by a Logitech game controller. Eight-day trips, including the submersible dive to the Titanic, cost a reported $250,000 per seat.

• The company behind the doomed Titanic tourist submersible has “suspended all exploration and commercial operations.”
• CBS published an extended look at the Titan submersible.

Titan submersible suffered ‘catastrophic implosion’

• An underwater tourist vessel carrying five people, which was bound for the wreckage of the Titanic, has gone missing.

Richard Lawler

The Wall Street Journal describes how the June 18th, 2023 disaster that killed five people on a trip to the Titanic hasn’t entirely stalled the industry:

As [Triton Submarines CEO Patrick Lahey] and his peers see it, OceanGate’s problems weren’t broader submersible problems. They say classed subs are considered exceptionally safe modes of transportation thanks to rigorous testing of designs and materials. “In that sense, OceanGate didn’t make the industry look bad,” says McCallum. “It made us look good.”

Sep 29, 2023

A movie about the failed Titan submersible is already in the works

It’s only been months since the implosion of OceanGate’s Titan tourist submersible , but Hollywood producers are already working on a film based on the incident. MindRiot Entertainment will make the film, with E. Brian Dobbins ( The Blackening , Black-ish ) serving as co-producer, according to a report from Deadline .

The movie will follow the events that took place before, during, and after the Titan’s implosion, Deadline reports. In June, the Titan submersible set off on a journey to tour the wreckage of the Titanic at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean. After losing contact with the surface , the US Coast Guard found that the Titan experienced a “catastrophic implosion” on the way down, killing all five passengers on board, including the CEO of OceanGate, Stockton Rush.

Jul 6, 2023

Yeah, that seems like a logical next move for OceanGate after the Titan vessel’s implosion killed five people, including OceanGate CEO Stockton Rush, as they traveled to the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean to visit the remains of the Titanic (via CNN ).

The company’s website still advertises $250,000 trips to the Titanic or hydrothermal vents in the Azores.

Jun 28, 2023

Photos published by CBS give us our first look at what remains of the Titan as crews work to bring debris from the sub to land. The tourist sub imploded last week during a journey to the Titanic’s wreckage, killing all five people on board.

Jun 26, 2023

Over the weekend, YouTuber and burger entrepreneur Mr. Beast tweeted that he had been invited to take a ride on the doomed Titanic tour submersible . However, one weird thing about his tweet was that while it clearly showed a screen capture from iMessage , it was a text from the sender, not the receiver.

He explained it later, saying it was a screenshot taken by the friend who originally invited him, who is probably also glad they didn’t take that particular trip.

Jun 25, 2023

CBS published a video today with more video from David Pogue’s November 2022 story about the Titan submersible , along with damning expert analysis of the flaws that likely led to the sub’s implosion .

The video shows a stark contrast between that analysis and the apparent overconfidence of OceanGate CEO Stockton Rush, who frequently pushed back on criticism and calls to seek safety certification of the sub.

YouTube creator MrBeast claimed in a tweet today that he was invited to join the Titan trip that disappeared on June 18th and was later determined to have imploded .

Curiously, the included screenshot of the invitation shows what appears to be a blue iMessage bubble. (Sent iMessages show as blue on the sender’s phone, not the receiver’s).

Update June 26, 8:25AM ET: He later tweeted that the screenshot was from the friend who invited him .

Jun 24, 2023

Travel Weekly EIC Arnie Weissman wrote a series of articles about a May trip he almost took aboard the OceanGate Titan (via Insider ).

He says OceanGate CEO Stockton Rush told him the sub’s hull used discounted Boeing carbon fiber that was “past its shelf life for use in airplanes” and claimed Boeing, NASA, and the University of Washington (UW) were involved in Titan’s design and testing.

Boeing and UW have both denied involvement, and NASA says it only served in a consulting capacity, per Insider .

[ www.travelweekly.com ]

The texts, which Bloom posted to Facebook, show Rush offering a cut-rate deal at just $150,000 per seat for a trip on the Titan. Bloom said he wasn’t able to go because of a scheduling conflict, and the slots went to Shahzada Dawood and his son, Sulemon, who were on the sub when it imploded .

In the texts, Bloom said his son was concerned about danger, but Rush waved him off:

“While there’s obviously risk it’s way safer than flying in a helicopter or even scuba divind. There hasn’t been even an injury in 35 years in a non-miltary sub.”

In 2019, after taking a trip on the ill-fated OceanGate Titan , submersible expert Karl Stanley said he heard an increasingly loud cracking sound over the two-hour trip down, according to The New York Times . He tried to warn Rush:

In the April 2019 email to Mr. Rush, Mr. Stanley said the loud cracking sounds that they had heard during their dive “sounded like a flaw/defect in one area being acted on by the tremendous pressures and being crushed/damaged.” He wrote that the loud, cracking noise signaled there was “an area of the hull that is breaking down.”

Stanley said experts confronted Rush about the safety of his sub at a 2018 crewed submersible conference, but he was “determined” to build it anyway. Shortly after, over three dozen industry experts wrote Rush, urging him to put his sub through certification.

[ The New York Times ]

Jun 23, 2023

Director James Cameron has given another interview, had a lot to say to CNN about the Titan , including that there’s an indication the sub dumped ballast and started to ascend before ever reaching the sea floor. He also apparently knew of the implosion sounds picked up by Navy listening devices as early as Monday.

However, despite OceanGate’s claims that they could detect any problems in the carbon fiber-based hull using “real-time (RTM) hull health monitoring,” Cameron said that well-known issues with composite materials and the risks of progressive degradation made it the wrong choice for constructing a submersible.

After the Titan lost contact with the surface, the WSJ reports that the US Navy “conducted an analysis of acoustic data” from a top-secret detection system.

It later found what it believes was the sound of the Titan’s implosion near the Titanic’s wreckage on Sunday, but officials decided to continue the search and rescue mission to “make every effort to save the lives on board.”

Jun 22, 2023

The Titanic director, who visited the remains of the 1912 shipwreck several times, responded to the news of the Titan tourist sub’s “catastrophic implosion” during an interview with ABC News:

A number of the top players in the deep submergence engineering community even wrote letters to the company [OceanGate], saying that what they were doing was too experimental to carry passengers and that needed to be certified. So I’m struck by the similarity of the Titanic disaster itself. The captain was repeatedly warned about ice ahead of his ship, and yet he steamed at full speed into an ice field on a moonless night.

The Titan submersible, which disappeared after setting off to tour the wreckage of the Titanic on Sunday, experienced a “catastrophic implosion,” US Coast Guard Rear Admiral John Mauger announced during a press conference on Thursday afternoon.

“This morning, an ROV, or remote-operated vehicle from the vessel Horizon Arctic discovered the tail cone of the Titan submersible approximately 1,600 feet from the bow of the Titanic on the seafloor,” Mauger stated. “The ROV subsequently found additional debris. In consultation with experts from within the unified command, the debris is consistent with the catastrophic loss of the pressure chamber.”

The Coast Guard will hold a press briefing at 3PM ET to discuss its findings from the debris field that a remote-operated vehicle (ROV) uncovered at the bottom of the ocean near the Titanic.

The Titan tourist submersible began its journey toward the shipwreck on Sunday before losing contact with its support ship. The sub’s 96 hours supply of oxygen was expected to run out this morning .

Jun 21, 2023

Iron Lung , an $5.99 indie game for the PC and Switch, puts you inside a compact submarine where you must navigate an eerie ocean of blood using only the grainy pictures taken from outside the vessel.

The game’s developer, David Szymanski, saw sales spike on June 20th — just a couple of days after OceanGate’s tourist submersible lost contact with the surface. The sub, which is controlled using a simple Logitech gamepad , was supposed to journey toward the Titanic’s shipwreck that lies about 13,000 feet at the bottom of the ocean.

[ Polygon ]

A Canadian search aircraft with underwater detection capabilities picked up “banging” sounds coming from the depths around the HMS Titanic wreckage about every 30 minutes, per a US government memo obtained by CNN .

Rolling Stone , who first reported it, said an email to the Department of Homeland Security from the research group Explorers Society read:

“It is being reported that at 2 a.m. local time on site that sonar detected potential ‘tapping sounds’ at the location, implying crew may be alive and signaling.”

Knocking was heard 4 hours later when “additional sonar was deployed.”

Jun 20, 2023

The missing Titanic tour sub is steered with a simple Logitech gamepad

On Sunday morning, an OceanGate submarine vessel with five people aboard went missing in the Atlantic about an hour and forty-five minutes into a planned trip to explore the wreckage of the RMS Titanic. Made of carbon fiber and titanium, the vessel has enough air for 96 hours; however, as word of the emergency has spread, there’s also shock at the wireless Logitech F710 gamepad used for steering.

The Titan advertises “state-of-the-art lighting and sonar navigation systems plus internally and externally mounted 4K video and photographic equipment,” and this CBS News Sunday Morning segment from David Pogue, taken last summer, showed the reporter laughing as he was shown its controls. OceanGate CEO Stockton Rush holds up the F710, saying, “We run the whole thing... with this game controller.” The reporter refers to the “MacGyver jury-riggedness” of the whole thing, using many off-the-shelf parts, as Rush said, “certain things, you want to be button down,” noting work with Boeing and NASA.

Jun 19, 2023

Monica Chin

The vessel lost contact with its research vessel an hour and 45 minutes into its descent on Sunday morning. A search is underway approximately 900 miles east of Cape Cod.

The five occupants have between 70 and 96 hours of oxygen available, Coast Guard Rear Admiral John Mauger said at a press conference earlier today.

[ Washington Post ]

Here's the new submersible a billionaire wants to take to Titanic wreck

An Ohio real estate billionaire has flown 254 miles into space to the International Space Station and dived 7 miles beneath the Pacific into the Mariana Trench. Now he plans to visit Titanic.

Larry Connor, 74, says he'll visit the wreck in a two-person submersible now being designed. His announcement comes a year after the fatal undersea implosion of the OceanGate sub Titan as it approached the sunken liner in 2023.

Five people, including OceanGate CEO Stockton Rush, died aboard the Titan.

After Titan’s loss, Connor contracted with Triton Submarines , a manufacturer of deep-sea submersibles, to build a vessel capable of repeated deep-sea dives. That story was initially reported by The Wall Street Journal.

Connor said a dive to the Titanic site can be done safely with proper engineering, USA TODAY reported.

Connor and Triton co-founder Patrick Lahey intend to research the Titanic site, according to The New York Times. A date has not been announced, but a voyage in 2026 is possible, the Times said.

Why build a new sub?

After the OceanGate sub disaster, Connor contacted Lahey and asked him to build a submersible that could safely visit Titanic on multiple missions, the Times reported.

The purpose was twofold: to enable Titanic research and to show the world that such a revolutionary sub could be built.

The new sub will be based on a Triton 4000/2 Abyssal Explorer , an existing Triton vehicle the company says is “the world’s deepest diving acrylic sub.”

The two-person sub has a depth rating of 13,123 feet, or nearly 2½ miles. Titanic lies at 12,500 feet .

Triton also has crewed vehicles capable of deeper dives. Its 36000/2 sub is capable of diving to full ocean depth, the company says.

The average ocean depth is 12,080 feet, but depths vary because the ocean floor isn’t flat – it has plains, mountains and canyons.

The deepest part is the Mariana Trench in the western Pacific Ocean, about 200 miles from Guam. It's about 35,876 feet deep, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

What else has billionaire Larry Connor accomplished?

Connor's planned trip to Titanic isn't his first adventure. Others include:

• 2021: Connor and Lahey dived more than 35,000 feet into the Mariana Trench.
• 2022: Connor was part of the International Space Station's first-ever civilian mission , which lasted 17 days. He was the pilot of the flight .

Connor is a licensed pilot and member of the International Aerobatic Club , which promotes sport aerobatics, the practice of flying aircraft in different maneuvers.

Connor is CEO of The Connor Group , a real estate investment company based in Dayton, Ohio. The company says it owns and operates luxury apartment communities across the U.S.

The Connor Group’s real estate portfolio is worth $5 billion , the Cincinnati Enquirer reported. Connor co-founded the company with two partners in 1991 and bought them out in 2003. His net worth is $2 billion, the Enquirer said.

Contributing: Mary Walrath-Holdridge, USA TODAY; Jason Rossi, Sarah Brookbank, Wayne Baker, Cincinnati Enquirer

Source: USA TODAY Network reporting and research; Reuters; Triton Submarines; National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration; livescience.com

The Titanic is overrated, deep-sea explorers say. The wealthy keep venturing to it anyway.

• The Titanic wreckage site continues to be a big draw for the wealthy and adventurous.
• But experienced deep-sea explorers tell Business Insider there's nothing more to see there.
• Hot sea vents and deep-water coral reefs are under-explored and far more accessible, explorers say.

The Titanic may be one of the most popular and identifiable wreckage sites in the history of sea travel.

It also may be one of the most overrated, deep-sea explorers told Business Insider.

More than a century after the ocean liner sank to the bottom of the Atlantic, the Titanic has proven the staying power of its lore, not least in part due to James Cameron's 1997 film , which became the first billion-dollar box office success. The film reignited interest in the ship and created a fandom that lives strong to this day. Titanic-themed birthday, anyone?

Then, in 2023, five people died in OceanGate's Titan submersible during a dive to the wreckage site, once again placing the iconic ship at the forefront of the news cycle.

Despite the wreckage's thorough documentation and the recent fate of the OceanGate submersible, the wealthy and well-resourced continue to pour efforts to venture 12,500 feet into the ocean just to see the site of the 1912 sinking.

Passengers on the Titan paid up to $250,000 for a seat inside the submersible. Now, billionaire real estate investor Larry Connor said he will voyage to the Titanic.

Deep-sea explorers are left wondering: Why?

'People are trying to impress people'

"The wreck is well-documented," Karl Stanley , a submersible expert, told BI in a recent interview. "That's probably the best documented deep-water wreck there is."

Stanley, who owns a submersible tourism company, Stanley Submarines, was one of many colleagues who warned OceanGate's CEO Stockton Rush about the dangers of rushing to produce a vessel that could take people to the Titanic.

For him, the wealthy's desire to visit the shipwreck has less to do with a genuine passion for deep-sea exploration and more to do with namesake recognition.

"I think whatever market exists for tourism to the Titanic is extremely analogous to the kind of clientele that pays Sherpas to drag them up Mt. Everest ," Stanley said, referring to the Nepalese ethnic group that dwells in the Himalayan mountains. Some climbers pay up to $15,000 per expedition to have a Sherpa guide, BI previously reported.

Related stories

Since the early 1900s, more than 330 people have died on the mountain, and 107 of them were Sherpas, according to The Himalayan Database.

Stanley said there are more dangerous but less traveled mountains and shipwrecks that are less deep but better preserved, such as the HMHS Britannic , Titanic's sister ship, which lies in a relatively shallow grave of about 400 feet, near the Greek island of Kea.

"People are trying to impress people," he said.

Guillermo Söhnlein , the cofounder of OceanGate who left the company in 2013, agreed with Stanley.

While he doesn't want to discourage anyone's genuine passion for the iconic ocean liner, Söhnlein told BI in an interview that the Titanic "holds no interest for me whatsoever."

"One of the reasons I talked with Stockton all the time in the recent years is he would always call me before the expedition to see if I wanted to come to the Titanic," he said.

"And honestly, I never had any desire to go to the Titanic. I just don't see the appeal of it," Söhnlein said, "For me, personally, I think a big part of that is because I prefer exploration. And the Titanic has already been visited, it's been documented, its been filmed. James Cameron has done a phenomenal job on it."

Brine pools and unexplored blue holes

Stanley and Söhnlein said they're less interested in shipwreck sites overall and more keen on exploring the ocean's ecosystem .

"Hot sea vents, brine pools, and deep-water coral reefs would all be more interesting than a shipwreck and can be accessed by going 2,000-5,000 feet, not the 13,000 feet it takes to get to the Titanic," Stanley said.

Similarly, Söhnlein is interested in deep trenches and hydrothermal vents — something Rush was also passionate about, he said.

Söhnlein explained that they're "almost completely unexplored," "play key roles in our planetary dynamics," and "they likely hold thousands of undiscovered and unknown life forms."

Söhnlein's company, Blue Marble Exploration, recently announced it would venture into Dean's Blue Hole, a site in the Bahamas about 660 feet from the surface.

"Dean's Blue Hole is an enigma for geologists studying underwater caverns," Blue Marble Exploration's website says. "It is the largest of its kind in the world, and yet very little is known about it, including how it formed more than 15,000 years ago."

The company adds that it expects to find "human remains" of people who drowned in the blue hole "due to a variety of misfortunes."

It's unclear how many people died at the site. The most notable case occurred in 2013 when American freediver Nicholas Mevoli attempted to break a freediving record by reaching 72 meters in a single breath, The New York Times reported. Mevoli surfaced but died shortly after.

Watch: One year after Titan tragedy, another billionaire wants to prove deep-sea exploration is safe

• Main content

Watch CBS News

A look at Titanic wreck ocean depth and water pressure — and how they compare to the deep sea as a whole

By Caitlin O'Kane

June 23, 2023 / 12:59 PM EDT / CBS News

Debris from the Titan , the  submersible that disappeared on an expedition to the wreckage of the Titanic, was found nearby the ship, which sits on the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean. The Titanic is a whopping 2 and a half miles beneath the surface — far too deep for a human to survive the pressure if not in an equipped vessel. Still, there are other parts of the ocean that are even deeper, and many parts yet to be explored.

Ocean depths

About 71% of the Earth is covered in water and the average depth is 12,080 feet — which is nearly as deep as Mount Fuji is tall, according to Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute.  Only 5% of the ocean has been explored.

The depths of the ocean are broken into zones. The euphotic zone, or "sunlight zone," extends down to about 656 feet and is where sunlight can penetrate, so plants like phytoplankton and macro algae can grow,  according to NOAA .

The Yellow Sea, which lies between China and Korea, is entirely in this zone at about 499 feet deep. The Statue of Liberty, at 305 feet, would become fully submerged in this zone. 

Between 656 and 3,280 feet is the dysphotic zone, known as the "twilight zone," where the amount of sunlight decreases drastically as the depth increases.

The Baltic and Red Seas reach this depth. The Eiffel Tower, which stands at about 1,083 feet tall, and the Burj Khalifa, the world's tallest skyscraper at 2,716.5 feet tall, would become submerged in this zone. 

At about 3,280 feet, you hit the aphotic zone, where no light can reach. Within this zone, the "midnight zone" extends to about 13,000 feet and the abyss extends to about 19,685 feet. Anything deeper than this is the hadal zone. 

The Titanic wreckage, which is about 12,500 feet deep in the North Atlantic, is in the midnight zone. That's as deep as about nine Empire State Buildings stacked on top of each other.

The Mediterranean Sea, Caribbean Sea, Red Sea and all the world's oceans reach what's known as the aphotic zone, where the only light is generated by organisms. There is less food and less life down there, but sometimes dead animals like whales or sharks can sink this deep. 

The deepest part of the world's oceans, the Mariana Trench, is about 36,070 feet, nearly seven miles deep, in the hadal zone, according to NOAA . The trench is in the Pacific Ocean, off the coast of Japan, and has been explored before. 

Hamish Harding, who died on the Titan submersible traveling to the Titanic wreckage, was one of the handful of people who have explored the Mariana Trench. In 2021, he traveled 2.5 miles along the ocean floor and set a record for the  longest distance traveled  at the deepest part of the ocean by a crewed vessel.

The pressure in the trench is 8 tons per square inch, but still, life exists, NOAA says. Single-celled organisms called foraminifera were discovered in the Challenger Deep, the deepest point in the trench, in 2005. 

The deepest a fish has ever been spotted was 27,460 feet deep in the Puerto Rico Trench, in between the Caribbean Sea and Atlantic Ocean.

Ocean pressure

The pressure at sea level is about 14.7 pounds per square inch, which you can't feel, according to  the National Ocean Service , which is part of NOAA. But as you dive deeper, the hydrostatic pressure, or force of a liquid on an object, increases and your eardrums will start to feel the change. Every 33 feet, the pressure increases one atmosphere, which is the unit of measure for barometric pressure.

Some animals, like whales, can survive extreme depths and pressures. The  deepest a human has ever reached scuba diving is about 1,090 feet, achieved by Ahmed Gabr in 2014 after years of training. At that depth, the pressure is about 470 pounds per square inch.

The recommended maximum depth for conventional scuba divers is 130 feet,  according to NOAA . 

Few vessels are equipped to withstand the pressure of extreme depths. American explorer Victor Vescovo used a $48 million submersible when he and Harding explored the Challenger Deep. 

According to a former employee of OceanGate Expeditions, which built the Titan, the submersible was only equipped to withstand the pressure of 1,300 meters, or about 4,265 feet. That employee, submersible pilot David Lochridge, who was fired by OceanGate,  filed a lawsuit against the company  in 2018, alleging the Titan would travel about 13,000 feet deep, despite the fact that depth had never been achieved by a sub with this type of carbon fiber hull.

The Titanic submersible 

The Titan launched from Newfoundland, Canada, on Sunday, with five people on board journeying to the Titanic wreckage, which is located about 350 miles from Newfoundland. About an hour and 45 minutes into the Titan's dive, it lost contact with the crew on the Polar Prince research ship above. 

After a desperate and days-long search, debris from the submersible was found about 1,600 feet from the Titanic wreckage. It was determined that the sub imploded just hours into its dive, killing all five passengers on board, officials said.

Stefano Brizzolara, co-director of the Virginia Tech Center for Marine Autonomy and Robotics, says failure of the sub's pressure hull probably caused the implosion. "You must consider that at 4,000 meters depths, the pressure is 400 times what we experience at sea level," he told CBS News. That's about 13,000 feet, or nearly 2.5 miles.

Inflated car tires have about 2 atmospheres of pressure, he said, so the pressure at this depth is 200 times that. At this depth, there is also no light, and if a strong light is brought down, it can penetrate only about 65 feet, so sonar must be used to navigate, Brizzolara said. 

Search and rescue crews were using ROVs, or  remotely operated vehicles , to search for the Titan. These vessels are equipped to travel the 13,000 feet down to the Titanic and withstand the 6,000 pounds per square inch of pressure. An ROV from a Canadian vessel ended up locating the Titan debris. 

• Submersible

Caitlin O'Kane is a New York City journalist who works on the CBS News social media team as a senior manager of content and production. She writes about a variety of topics and produces "The Uplift," CBS News' streaming show that focuses on good news.

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Titan’s experimental design drew concern even before its doomed dive

The catastrophic implosion that killed all five people aboard a submersible vessel is likely to intensify calls for stronger regulations and oversight of an industry that has long operated in a legal gray area, experts say.

The now-deceased CEO of OceanGate Inc., which operated the Titan submersible for tours of the Titanic wreckage , had hailed the lighter carbon fiber composite hull of the vessel as an innovation in a field in which others have long relied on more expensive titanium.

But maritime regulation experts and experienced mariners say the material and shape of the vessel gave them concern. They also said OceanGate shouldn’t have eschewed the typical inspection process by independent agencies, which is not legally mandated but routinely followed by others in the submersible community. Past lawsuits also raised questions about OceanGate’s safety standards.

Podcast episode

Rear Adm. John Mauger, who led the Coast Guard’s search for Titan, said Thursday that the tragedy is likely to lead to a review of regulations and standards. “Right now, we’re focused on documenting the scene,” he said.

The company’s missions fell outside any single country’s jurisdiction, said Salvatore Mercogliano, a maritime historian with Campbell University. The American-made Titan was diving into international waters after launching from the Canadian-flagged vessel Polar Prince. The Transportation Safety Board of Canada said Friday that it had dispatched a team to investigate the Canadian ship’s involvement.

“There’s literally no requirement out there, because there’s no one out there to enforce that,” Mercogliano said.

What next in search for answers to Titanic sub’s ‘catastrophic implosion’?

He said at least Canada and the United States are likely to adopt more regulations around submersibles and suggested that the International Maritime Organization — the United Nations’ shipping policy arm — may require submersibles to register like other vessels. Right now, he said, they are treated like cargo that is brought aboard a larger vessel coming into port.

Experts say it increasingly looks like the Titan submersible imploded under the pressure of 2.5 miles of ocean water, though an official investigation is ongoing.

Within a debris field about 1,600 feet from the bow of the Titanic, the search team found the front and back portions of the pressurized hull, said Paul Hankins, who leads salvage operations for the U.S. Navy. Carl Hartsfield of Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution said the debris indicates that the submersible probably imploded before reaching the ocean floor.

An unusual design for a deep-ocean submersible

OceanGate’s Titan submersible departed from the more traditional titanium-sphere design for deep-ocean submersibles, stitching a carbon-fiber cylinder between two titanium hemispheres to create a larger pressure hull that could accommodate more passengers. Searchers found the two titanium end caps on the ocean floor, separated from the cylinder.

BOW END CAP

AFT END CAP

CARBON FIBER

Sources: OceanGate; University of Washington;

U.S. Coast Guard

WILLIAM NEFF/THE WASHINGTON POST

An unusual design

for a deep-ocean submersible

Sources: OceanGate; University of Washington; U.S. Coast Guard

CARBON FIBER CYLINDER

PRESSURE HULL

Pressure from repeated dives to the Titanic wreck might have weakened Titan’s hull, said Don Walsh, an oceanographer who was the first submersible pilot in the U.S. Navy.

“They got away with it for a couple of years,” he said. “It was not a question of if, but when.”

Andrew Von Kerens, a spokesman for OceanGate, when asked for a comment Wednesday, said: “We are unable to provide any additional information at this time.”

‘Guardrails’

OceanGate CEO Stockton Rush , who was piloting the Titan during its fatal voyage, had previously expressed his belief that innovation requires disrupting norms.

Before the Passenger Vessel Safety Act of 1993 , tourist submersibles could be piloted by anyone with a valid U.S. Coast Guard captain’s license. But the law created new regulations for vessels diving deep, so long as they set off in American waters or fly a U.S. flag. Titan did neither.

Rush told Smithsonian Magazine in June 2019 that the law was well intended, but was overly cautious by putting passenger safety over commercial innovation.

“There hasn’t been an injury in the commercial sub industry in over 35 years,” he told the magazine. “It’s obscenely safe, because they have all these regulations. But it also hasn’t innovated or grown — because they have all these regulations.”

Rush was piloting the Titan when it lost contact with its mother ship Sunday, the company said. The vessel had visited the Titanic wreck in previous years.

Vessels that dive to areas of extreme pressure can experience damage to their hulls over time, Mercogliano said. Periodic inspections from a classification agency are crucial to maintaining safety, he added.

Titan did not undergo that classification process, according to OceanGate.

In 2019, the company published a blog post titled “ Why Isn’t Titan Classed? ” In it, the company said most marine accidents were the result of operator error — not mechanical failure.

“As a result, simply focusing on classing the vessel does not address the operational risks,” the blog post reads. “Maintaining high-level operational safety requires constant, committed effort and a focused corporate culture — two things that OceanGate takes very seriously and that are not assessed during classification.”

Questions about the regulatory and safety standards of OceanGate were raised in 2018 when the company sued a former employee and accused him of sharing confidential information, according to court documents reviewed by The Washington Post.

David Lochridge, former director of marine operations at OceanGate, filed a counterclaim for wrongful termination. He alleged that OceanGate refused to pay a manufacturer to build a window that would meet the required depth of 4,000 meters, or more than 13,000 feet, the depth needed to reach Titanic, according to court filings.

Lochridge also alleged that he had expressed concerns about the quality control and safety of the Titan, and he encouraged OceanGate to use the American Bureau of Shipping to inspect and certify the submersible. Lochridge and OceanGate settled the lawsuit in 2018.

OceanGate declined to comment on the lawsuit and allegations. In court records, OceanGate said it had special monitors that would identify cracking in the hull if Titan was close to failure. Lochridge declined to comment when reached through his attorney, but he said he was praying for those aboard Titan.

A group of industry professionals also raised concerns about Titan not undergoing the certification process in 2018, according to William Kohnen, president and CEO of the engineering firm Hydrospace Group.

Kohnen and other members of the Marine Technology Society debated sending Rush a letter urging him to go through the classification process, warning that a “single negative event could undo” decades of safe exploration in underwater vehicles. The group, Kohnen said, ultimately never sent the letter, which was first reported by the New York Times.

“That process is an accumulation of knowledge that is our safety guideline,” said Kohnen, who called Rush at the time to make the same plea the letter did. “These are our guardrails.”

‘Explosion in reverse’

Several deep-sea exploration experts say they wouldn’t have trusted Titan’s hull, which was made of mostly carbon fiber wound around titanium.

Carbon fiber is a relatively new material for deep sea applications, said Stefano Brizzolara, professor in ocean engineering at Virginia Tech. Traditionally, vessels are made of steel and titanium, which can better withstand pressure and keep water out.

“Carbon fiber doesn’t do that,” he said. “It deforms a little bit. And then it immediately and suddenly cracks and breaks.”

“The outside pressure is so high that it causes an implosion,” Brizzolara added. “A kind of explosion in reverse.”

As you go deeper into the ocean, the pressure outside the vessel increases. At 4,000 meters, the pressure is 400 times the atmospheric pressure that humans experience on earth, he said.

A 2018 blog post on OceanGate’s website said the vessel was tested to 4,000 meters. But the use of a new material in the composite hull combined with the lack of outside oversight gave some experts pause — especially if the vessel was being used to transport people.

“For human occupancy, a composite pressure vessel is not something that I would have a lot of confidence in unless there was a serious, serious third-party oversight,” David Lovalvo, founder of the Global Foundation for Ocean Exploration, said.

Submersibles are used daily around the world for commercial activities like laying cable and pipe with very few accidents, said Lovalvo, who has been 13,000 feet down several times in his four-decade career.

Even though the classing process is not required if operating in international waters and launching from another vessel, as Titan was, many commercial submersibles still undergo it, according to Lovalvo. They are also made with what he deems safer materials, like titanium, for insurance reasons, he said.

Matt Tulloch, an American who has been to Titanic four times, said the submersible that he visited the wreck site on was a sphere made of titanium.

When asked about the industry’s opinion of OceanGate, he said: “It was a company that was innovative and was pushing the boundaries of traditional safety,” but added: “They were not as cavalier as some of the reports seem to portray them as.”

Tulloch said he was close friends with and deeply trusted Paul-Henri Nargeolet — one of the five people who perished aboard Titan — for 30 years. They met through Tulloch’s father, George Tulloch , who funded the first salvage mission to Titanic.

Matt Tulloch said Nargeolet, an experienced French mariner, has earned the title “Mr. Titanic” because of his scores of trips down deep.

“There is a fair assessment to be made that these guys were pushing the limits, and I say that as neutrally as I can. Because in this domain, there’s always this getting to the next level, and to do that you have to push it to the limit,” Tulloch said.

Walsh, the former Navy submersible pilot, said the decision to have a carbon fiber hull, rather than a metal like titanium, was risky.

“God bless them if they want to do experimental stuff, but for God’s sake don’t take members of the public down while you’re doing that,” Walsh said.

Missing Titanic submersible

The latest: After an extensive search, the Coast Guard found debris fields that have been indentified as the Titan submersible. OceanGate, the tour company, has said all 5 passengers are believed dead.

The Titan: The voyage to see the Titanic wreckage is eight days long, costs $250,000 and is open to passengers age 17 and older. The Titan is 22 feet long, weighs 23,000 pounds and “has about as much room as a minivan,” according to CBS correspondent David Pogue. Here’s what we know about the missing submersible .

The search: The daunting mission covers the ocean’s surface and the vast depths beneath. The search poses unique challenges that are further complicated by the depths involved. This map shows the scale of the search near the Titanic wreckage .

The passengers: Hamish Harding , an aviation businessman, aircraft pilot and seasoned adventurer, posted on Instagram that he was joining the expedition and said retired French navy commander Paul-Henri Nargeolet was also onboard. British Pakistani businessman Shahzada Dawood, 48, and his son, Suleman, 19, were also on the expedition, their family confirmed. The CEO of OceanGate , the submersible expedition company, was also on the vessel. Here’s what we know about the five missing passengers.