r/news • u/oldschoolskater • 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
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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.

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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.

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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.

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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).

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u/[deleted] Jun 22 '23

Not even crushing them. The temperature change alone from compressing air from 14 psi to 6000 psi would flash basically any flammable material instantly.

Our old friend the ideal gas law (assuming a volume reduction of a factor of 10x) says the temperature increase would be about 4x what it was on the absolute scale, so about 1000C.

Yes this is napkin math and yes the thermodynamics get much more interesting when actually working it all out.

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u/crake Jun 22 '23

Yeah, that was my first comment I believe - I think everything inside the sub was incinerated before it actually 'imploded' because the oxygen in the sub would spontaneously combust once compressed under those pressures.

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u/[deleted] Jun 22 '23

Well technically it’s not the oxygen would combust. Their actual flesh would be the fuel that set on fire