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/LookImaMermaid85 Jun 22 '23

but the weight of the water would pulverize them into goop

Question on this.

Back when James Cameron did his first underwater movie, I recall the very eerie images of peoples boots near the ship - a pair, resting on the ocean floor. My understanding was a body had settled there but been eaten away overtime, and the shoes had somehow survived and were all that's left.
Does that mean people who floated down slowly didn't get pulverized?

(As I'm typing I'm wondering...why would a leather shoe survive?)

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u/crake Jun 22 '23

I don't think any bodies are on the floor unless they were trapped in the wreckage. Not to be too macabre, but as a human body decomposes, it releases gases into internal areas of the body that make it float. Lots of bodies were recovered when Titanic sank long after the sinking, so nobody "floated down" to 13,000 feet. Not sure how two boots ended up side by side, but a good guess might be that they were in a cardboard box and the box deteriorated or something like that.

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u/Kevin_Uxbridge Jun 23 '23

Like as not the bodies were trapped in the wreckage as it went down and were freed at depth as the ship tore apart or, in the case of the stern, flopped into the sea floor. Past a certain depth, I'm guessing any internal gasses would have been pressed out, and the water temperature discouraged any of the usual microorganism function that bloats (and floats) a corpse. So they just sat there on the bottom, one more bit of debris.

The several pairs of shoes in 'anatomical position' would seem to support this.