The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) published an audio record of the Titan submersible imploding while the five passengers died at instant. This 20-second audio clip was released by the Defense Visual Information Distribution Service (DVIDS) on Friday and contains static noise, a loud bang, and a ghostly return into white noise, presumed to be the last sounds emitted from the ill-fated submersible.
The officials confirmed that blast boom was the sound from the sub imploding before it could reach the site of the Titanic wreck in the North Atlantic Ocean on June 18, 2023.
Implosion detected 900 miles away
The report stated that the audio was recorded on a moored passive acoustic recorder, almost 900 miles from the place of the implosion. The US Coast Guard reported that the clip correlates with the alleged acoustic signature of a Titan submersible implosion.
Victims of the Titan disaster
- Hamish Harding – British adventurer
- Shahzada Dawood & Suleman Dawood – Father-son duo from Pakistan
- Paul-Henri Nargeolet – French deep-sea expert
- Stockton Rush – CEO of OceanGate Expeditions
Engineering flaws and lack of certification
There were grave concerns about the engineering failure that surfaced after the incident. The investigators found that Titan had not been independently accredited as suitable for deep seafaring and contained extreme design flaws, which raised safety concerns.
Within two hours of starting the dive, the Titan’s mothership lost communication with the submersible, which then initiated an international search frantic, showing television footage of submarines and aircraft searching the deep. Four days later, debris shed from the vessel by a remotely operated underwater vehicle was reported.
Safety warnings ignored before fatal dive
In October 2023, the last pieces of the Titan submersible were found after the US Coast Guard declared recovery, reaffirming claims on structural failures that precipitated the implosion—unlawfully ignoring all safety regulations before, during, and after the ill-fated expedition. Investigators later revealed that:
- The submarine had never received an independent review, despite standards of safety established by the whole industry.
- It had greatly troubled OceanGate in previous expeditions, having 70 equipment malfunction issues in the year 2021 and 48 more in 2022.
The incident has put a spotlight back on deep-sea tourism, clearly spelling out the perils unregulated exploration underwater can bring, while also raising questions about safety standards as they apply to extreme-depth submersibles.
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