For their sakes I hope that's what happened, instant death instead of watching the oxygen run out and freezing for days. I have a feeling some of the "shortcuts" the company took will be magnified now and the lawsuits will be coming fast. I feel bad for these folks but the amount of waivers they had to sign to just go would have thrown up a red flag to me, although if I am being honest the one time I went skydiving, I signed a bunch of waivers that I didnt even read that carefully, but going down 13k feet in the ocean is another level of dangerousness.
Looks like it was an implosion, even if it wasn't thou they wouldn't have lasted days in the cold... More like minutes...
They just confirmed that the debris field is consistent with the sub imploding before it fully descended to the floor, so that last time it communicated (15min before it would've touched ground) was likely when it imploded.
The pressure at that depth is roughly equivalent to the weight of an entire adult elephant on a single nickle. Now think of that Nickle made of human flesh.
I feel badly only for the 19-year-old kid. Rich father probably pretty domineering and made him come along, but even if the kid wanted to, I don't think many 19-year-olds are savvy enough to understand putting their whole life on the line for a truly stupid adventure like this, especially with almost no upside. Jesus. Anyway, in terms of what happens, here's one way to think of it. The human body actually has an outward pressure and we've evolved to have exactly the pressure we need at the earth's surface. Humans do swell just slightly at high altitudes, and the body compresses even when you scuba dive. So if you're at these incredible depths, all the soft tissue would get compacted onto the skeleton and some of the bones might even start to crush. (Not sure of bone tensile strengths exactly.) But basically human becomes insta-skeleton with a cloud of blood and fluid in the surrounding water. EDIT: And I'm not a doctor (not the useful kind) but I think the nerve pulses would be so overwhelming that the human brain would immediately black out. No suffering, and they probably didn't even have a moment of fear, like "what's that creaking noise?" No, when materials fail under that kind of strain, **** happened immediately.
I feel bad for the families. As for the 19 year old I have no idea what their family dynamic was like but it wouldn’t surprise me if he wanted to Go and not his dad making him. When I was that age and even older I did a lot of crazy and stupid things and have come close to death myself. Also we send 19 year old to war and into disaster sites. It’s a tragedy but so is a 19 year old dying on the front lines in Ukraine.
James Cameron was interviewed after the implosion. He said he and Bob Ballard believed that, from talking to the various folks involved around this, that the submersible did have a warning from the system about a problem. He said they dropped their weights to float to the surface. Don't know if he's right but that's what he said. Hmm. He was talking in the context of a warning from the sensors that monitor the carbon fiber hull for cracking. He also wasn't supportive of using carbon fiber. He said steel and titanium are the ones to go with. And, acrylic...in reference to a submersible company he has an investment in and they use that.
Sorry wasn’t meant to call you out. Just pointing out that unfortunately a lot of 19 year olds die and so dangerous and difficult things.
This might be D&D material but if it hasn’t happened already there are going to be a lot of companies offering to take people to dangerous places for tourism. Now that we have three private space companies there is likely going to be more. Many probably won’t have the same resources snd there will be a strong temptation to cut corners in cost. This sub was essentially unregulated and unlicensed because there wasn’t an agreed upon agency to do so. Should we have regulations to start addressing situations like this?
This is why I don't leave my house. Literally shaking thinking about what it would be like in that sub. I don't need to see a rusty ass boat.
I actually had thought about taking a trip to Patagonia and then a ship ride to Antarctica, but stuff like this has me thinking twice about that little voyage. lol.
This tragedy made me think of the pioneering 3 person deep sea submersible, the Alvin. Built for the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts by Hahn & Clay Steel of Houston, a 6-foot diameter HY-100 steel sphere was fabricated in December of 1962, and the window holes cut in the spring of 1963 for the Alvin. A member of my family worked for Hahn and Clay during this period and I got to talk to the remarkable gentleman in charge of creating the pressure hull of the Alvin on more than one occasion. After 50 years, the Alvin got a big makeover. It looks tiny, but is well cushioned and reasonably comfortable inside. In the image below, Alvin's old sphere (left) had only one forward-looking viewport for the pilot, and so scientists looking out the port and starboard viewports could not simultaneously see what the pilots was looking at. The new sphere has three forward-looking viewports, with overlapping field of views for pilots and scientists. (Matthew G. Barton/Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution) The Alvin on the left, below. If you look closely, you can see the pressure hull. Tested again and again, used for decades and updated several times, surrounded by the "submarine" apparatus you can see in the image above, with the safety of those using it always paramount, the contrast between how the Alvin was created and used, and that of the OceanGate submersible couldn't be greater, in my opinion. Based on what I've read, the owner of OceanGate cut corners in many different ways, something I seriously doubt that the passengers who paid large sums of money for their "adventure" to see the wreck of the Titanic were aware of. A sad outcome that might have been avoided, in my opinion.
Deckard, good piece about the Alvin. My dad used to research in Woods Hole and I spent several summers there. I saw the Alvin in person several times along with her support ships. I also met several people who crewed and worked on her.
