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(Bloomberg) — A remote-controlled underwater vehicle has found a field of debris near the wreckage of the Titanic, where rescuers are searching for the missing underwater hull with five people aboard.
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The U.S. Coast Guard said Thursday that experts on the team leading the search are evaluating the new information. The Coast Guard will hold a press conference in Boston at 3 p.m.
The Canadian ship Horizon Atlantic has deployed a remote-controlled vessel to assist in the international search. The French vessel L’Atalante reached the search area and launched its own so-called ROV, the Coast Guard also said.
A flotilla of search vessels has been gathering in the North Atlantic about 900 miles (1,450 kilometers) east of Cape Cod, Massachusetts, since the ship went missing on a dive to investigate the Titanic on Sunday. The Coast Guard said Wednesday that the Navy is sending a hoisting system to the area that can recover large and heavy sunken objects such as planes or small boats from deep water.
Time is of the essence for the crew if they are still alive and their ship remains intact. The Titan, which started with about 96 hours of air in an emergency, is theoretically down to its last reserves. The crew would also have limited food and water.
“We need to remain optimistic and hopeful,” Coast Guard Captain Jamie Frederick said at a briefing in Boston on Wednesday.
Still, prospects for quickly locating the missing ship remain dim, Rob Larter, a marine geophysicist for the British Antarctic Survey, said at a Science Media Center briefing Thursday.
“It’s a needle in a haystack unless you have a precise location,” he said. “It could potentially take weeks of intensive research.”
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It is not clear if there will be enough time to retrieve the submarine – even if it was found immediately – before the air supply is completely exhausted. On Wednesday, the Coast Guard’s Frederick reiterated that the task force’s goal was still to safely rescue Titan’s crew — and that the search would continue for now.
With that goal in mind, the Navy’s Flyaway Deep Ocean Salvage System — known as Fadoss — could retrieve Titan from the surface. It is equipped with a motion compensator to compensate for the heaving movements of the vessel during each winch operation.
“Sometimes we don’t find what we’re looking for,” Frederick said. “Sometimes you are in a position where you have to make a difficult decision.”
As gear and more ships raced to the search area, the hunt for Titan on Wednesday focused on unidentified sounds detected underwater. The sounds were picked up over the past two days by a Canadian aircraft equipped with sonar equipment.
“We’re looking for where the sounds are and that’s all we can do,” Frederick said. “We don’t know what they are, to be honest.”
With few other clues, the unfamiliar sounds have become the focus of the race to find the crew. An armada of ships from around the world, advised by submarine and ocean experts, are also searching a vast search area of open water already about twice the size of Connecticut and 4 miles deep.
The task of locating and identifying the sounds has been made more difficult by the noise from the growing number of boats on the surface. So far, searches by ROVs have proved bare-bones. At the same time, the constantly changing weather, sea currents and sea conditions mean that the search zone is expanding by the hour.
“The fact that the search area is so large means that no one has been able to pinpoint with certainty where those sounds are coming from,” Larter said.
A surface mothership lost all communication with the Titan on Sunday, about 1 hour and 45 minutes after it began diving toward the Titanic, which sank in 1912 on its maiden transatlantic voyage. The Titan, a 6.7-meter vessel made of carbon fiber and titanium, is designed to operate at a maximum depth of 4,000 meters.
The underwater robot deployed by the French, meanwhile, can go as deep as the Titanic site, about 4,000 meters below the surface. The underwater exploration company Magellan will also provide one of their ROVs “in the near future,” the U.S. Coast Guard said Wednesday. Magellan’s equipment can go down to 6,000 meters and has descended several times to the wreckage of the Titanic.
Several private vessels, one with a decompression chamber and some with underwater search equipment, are also preparing to join the search. OceanGate Expeditions, operator of Titan and the Titanic research voyage, is leading the underwater search.
The crew aboard the Titan includes Hamish Harding, the founder of investment firm Action Group and an avid adventurer, and French maritime expert Paul Henry Nargeolet. The other three are OceanGate founder Stockton Rush, and Shahzada and Suleman Dawood, a father and son in one of Pakistan’s most prominent families.
(Retops with news of ROV reaching the seabed)
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