Global Courant
As military and civilian fleets scan the Atlantic Ocean off the coast of New England and Canada for signs of the missing OceanGate Titan submarine, people around the world are hoping that the sounds picked up on Tuesday are proof that the international crew is still alive.
Dr. Jeff Karson, professor emeritus of earth and environmental sciences at Syracuse University, is concerned that efforts to pinpoint the location of unidentified sounds picked up by search and rescue teams on Tuesday and Wednesday could take too long — and divert resources to could lead the wrong way if the source turns out to be anything other than trapped crew members beating the ship’s hull.
“I’m concerned that there are bogus noises and noises that inadvertently divert the search away from the area to be surveyed,” Karson said.
‘SCARED’ SOUNDS CONFIRMED IN DESPERATE DEEP SEA SEARCH FOR MISSING TITAN SUB BUT SOURCE UNKNOWN
This file image from OceanGate shows the Titan submarine being launched from a platform. (OceanGate Expeditions)
Coast Guard Captain Jamie Frederick confirmed during a briefing on Wednesday afternoon that resources were immediately deployed to locate the source of a noise picked up repeatedly by Canadian pilots from Tuesday. However, despite those efforts, they had not found the submarine or the source of the noises.
“The Coast Guard spokesman was not clear that this was banging, and I’m afraid someone may have identified the noises that way in an overly optimistic interpretation,” he said. “And the other thing I didn’t like hearing was that he wouldn’t confirm that the sound was coming in 30 minute intervals.”
I hate to say it, but they could probably already run out of oxygen or be extremely low.
Carl Hartsfield, a retired Navy captain and a scientist at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, said at the briefing that the sounds had been “described as banging,” but authorities declined to elaborate.
NEW ASSETS ‘ON-SCENE’ IN MISSING TITANIC SUBMARINE SEARCH FOR CANADIANS GET ‘UNDERWATER SOUNDS’
“I can’t tell you what the noises are,” Frederick said. “But what I can tell you, and I think this is the most important point, is that we’re looking for where the sounds are.”
U.S. Coast Guard (USCG) Captain Jamie Frederick speaks to reporters about the search efforts for the submarine Titan that went missing on June 21, 2023 near the wreckage of the Titanic, at the Coast Guard base in Boston, Massachusetts. The USCG said Wednesday it had not identified the source of underwater noises detected by sonar as it searched for the missing submarine. “We don’t know what they are, to be honest,” Frederick said of the noises that had raised hopes that the five people on board are still alive. “We have to stay optimistic and hopeful when you’re in a search and rescue case,” he told reporters. (Joseph Prezioso/AFP via Getty Images)
What Frederick was able to tell the assembled journalists was that the number of surface craft would double Thursday morning to 10 out of five in the area by Wednesday. American and Canadian pilots fly around the clock, with Britain and France also helping in the overall effort.
“This is a search-and-rescue mission, 100%,” he said.
The OceanGate Titan submarine is missing along with five people on board: OceanGate CEO Stockton Rush; British businessman turned adventurer Hamish Harding, father and son Shahzada and Suleman Dawood, who are members of one of Pakistan’s wealthiest families; and Paul-Henry Nargeolet, a former French naval officer and leading Titanic expert.
“There is a whole community of scientists like myself and engineers involved in deep immersion science, and everyone has been on the edge of their seats for days and will continue to be until this whole thing is somehow resolved,” Karson told Fox News digitally. “This is heartbreaking on the one hand, and yet it’s a scientific problem on the other.”
Karson, also an adjunct scientist at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, which has sent experts to aid the search and rescue effort, has experience exploring the ocean floor in areas twice as deep as the missing OceanGate’s planned mission Titan submarine to visit the shipwrecked Titanic.
This file image from OceanGate shows the Titan submarine being towed in the Bahamas. (OceanGate Expeditions)
“Everyone is thinking about how we can use the sound to find this?” he said of the exclusive community of deep-sea scientists. “What are the right tools? How are we going to do this? How can it be ready in time to make a difference?”
He said that regardless of the nature of the “thumping”, sound will generally be the key to finding the missing submarine – either through action by the stranded crew or sonar search.
Hamish Harding poses for a photo during the RMS Titanic Expedition Mission 5 on Sunday, June 18, 2023. (@actionaviation/Twitter)
US and Canadian aircraft have deployed sonobuoys – devices dropped into the ocean to ping their surroundings, creating a network of beacons to help triangulate items of interest – hopefully the missing Titan in this case, he said.
Remote-controlled deep-sea vehicles, known as ROVs, are also on the scene, including one that can descend to depths of about 4,000 meters. The Titan submarine is said to have gone missing in waters 3,800 meters deep.
Equipment flown in by US Air Force transport aircraft is loaded onto the Horizon Arctic offshore vessel before being deployed to the search area of a missing OceanGate Expeditions submarine that was carrying five people to explore the sunken Titanic, in the port of St. John’s, Newfoundland, Canada June 20, 2023. (REUTERS/David Hiscock)
“Sound works just like light,” Karson said. “The closer you get to something, the more detail you can see.”
So the closer to the seafloor, the clearer the image, he said — but the trade-off is that you also get a narrower view.
SEARCH FOR MISSING TITANIC TOURIST SUB CONTINUES RACE AGAINST TIME
So those assets are being deployed in conjunction with surface craft using side-scanning sonar to locate objects from above that can be examined more closely, according to Dr. Manoj Mahajan, an associate professor at Stony Brook University and a former Department of Defense official.
“It’s an active sonar that uses acoustics to map the seafloor and detect anomalous objects, like a shipwreck, a plane crash or a stranded submarine,” he told Fox News Digital. “But time is the main issue in this case.”
This image shows the Bahamian research vessel Deep Energy that helped search for the submarine Titan on Tuesday, June 20, 2023. Titan includes a crew of five, including British billionaire Hamish Harding, who rescued the wreck of the Titanic, the ‘unsinkable’ ship that sank in 1912. The US Coast Guard, US Navy, Canadian Coast Guard and OceanGate Expeditions have formed a unified command to to search for the 21-foot submarine research vessel that went missing after losing contact with the research vessel Polar Prince on Sunday evening. Deep Energy arrived on site around 7 a.m. EDT on Tuesday and began remotely operated vehicles (ROV). A C-130 crew from the 106th Air National Guard also arrived on the scene to continue the search around 4:00 PM EDT. (US Coast Guard/cover images)
And time ran out Wednesday evening as the estimated air supply on the submarine dwindled to less than 12 hours.
“I hate to say it, but it’s very likely they’re already out of oxygen or extremely low on oxygen,” Karson said. “You can imagine these people are maximally stressed, hyperventilating and probably consuming a tremendous amount of oxygen.”
This file image from OceanGate shows people in the Titan submarine. The photo was not taken as part of the missing expedition. (OceanGate Expeditions)
On the other hand, he said, they would consume less oxygen when they are calm or asleep for extended periods of time.
“Having made many trips to the seabed myself in a submarine to do geology, it’s impossible not to think about these horrible what-if scenarios,” he said. “It’s not pretty, but that’s why there are a lot of safety factors built into these systems.”
That includes the ability to lose weight quickly and use the submarine’s natural buoyancy to float up to the surface, he said.
The pilot of a Royal Canadian Air Force CP-140 Aurora maritime surveillance aircraft of 14 Wing flies a search pattern for the missing OceanGate submarine, which had five people on board to explore the wreck of the sunken SS Titanic, in the Atlantic Ocean at Newfoundland, Canada, June 20, 2023, in a still image from a video. (Canadian Forces/Handout via REUTERS)
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“You should be able to do that with a simple turn of a key or something down there, but it didn’t happen,” he said. “So that suggests something, either they were hung up in a really complicated way, or there was a huge glitch there a long time ago, a few days ago, and there’s nothing we can do about it.”
If the ship is intact but stuck, he said, an ROV may be able to dislodge it or help it lose weight, allowing it to float to the top in just two hours for a surface rescue.
Michael Ruiz is a reporter for Fox News Digital. Story tips can be sent to michael.ruiz@fox.com and on Twitter: @mikerreports
