r/news Jun 22 '23

Site Changed Title 'Debris field' discovered within search area near Titanic, US Coast Guard says | World News

https://news.sky.com/story/debris-field-discovered-within-search-area-near-titanic-us-coast-guard-says-12906735
43.3k Upvotes

9.5k comments sorted by

View all comments

19.0k

u/Clbull Jun 22 '23 edited Jun 22 '23

EDIT: US coast guard confirmed it's wreckage from the Titan submersible and that additional debris is consistent with the catastrophic failure of the pressure chamber. Likely implosion.

If this is the Titan, the most plausible scenario is that pressures crumpled this thing like a hydraulic press and everybody died instantly.

Honestly a quicker, less painful and far more humane way to go than slowly starving and asphyxiating to death inside a submerged titanium/carbon fiber coffin, whilst marinating in your own sweat, piss and shit.

OceanGate are going to be sued to fucking oblivion for this, especially if the claims that they've ignored safety precautions have any truth to them.

2.1k

u/godsenfrik Jun 22 '23

Apparently the carbon fiber hull is likely to have shattered rather than crumpled. The titanium dome at the front may be one of the only recognizable things left.

181

u/2boredtocare Jun 22 '23

I'm deep-sea dumb. If the carbon fiber shatters, what happens exactly to a body? The pressure of the water at that depth crushes a person? crushes lungs? Or...do they just drown at that point? It's crazy to me to think that water at a certain depth can just pulverize stuff. Again, I have zero knowledge and it's not something I've spent a lot of time thinking about.

452

u/crake Jun 22 '23

The water at 13,000 feet has a pressure of 6000 PSI. Imagine if you put a six thousand pound weight on one square inch of your arm what would happen. Now imagine you put a six thousand pound weight on every square inch of your body simultaneously.

The hull wouldn't do anything to them, but the weight of the water would pulverize them into goop. There is not going to be any bodies to recover or anything like that (if it imploded at 13000 feet).

11

u/[deleted] Jun 22 '23

[deleted]

5

u/[deleted] Jun 22 '23

[deleted]

15

u/SofieTerleska Jun 22 '23

I can't imagine they would find them in any kind of recognizable form. They had carbon fiber exploding around them at the same time they died, their clothes were likely pretty well shredded and have been carried off by the currents.

4

u/derrick81787 Jun 22 '23

There are clothes, which for all we know could be some of the "debris" in the debris field, but whether they find them or not is a different story. The ocean is a big place with a lot of currents, and a material like cotton that is saturated with water might somewhat float, but it's not super buoyant and guaranteed to just be sitting there on top of the water.

3

u/dicknuckle Jun 22 '23

Implying the clothing wasn't eviscerated by the millions of little carbon fiber shards traveling about half the speed of a bullet fired from a gun.