The discovery of a landing frame and rear deck of the titan submarine They have put an end to the hopes of finding the five crew members alive, who have been missing near the wreck of the Titanic since last Sunday.
According to an expert and friend of two of the passengers, everything seems to indicate that the boat suffered a crack and caused a ‘catastrophic implosion‘ which would have killed Paul-Henri Nargeolet, Shahzada Dawood and her son Suleman, Hamish Harding and Stockton Rush.
“This is an unconventional submarine, the rear deck found is the pointed end and the landing frame is the small frame that it can sit on,” one of the experts assured the Daily Mail. This finding means that the helmet has not yet been found“but two very important parts of the whole system have been discovered and they would not be found unless it was fragmented.”
What is an implosion?
Investigators are trying to locate other remains of the submarine to try to find the cause of the disaster.
The first hypothesis is that the submarine suffered a hull breach and the submersible imploded. As explained by Guillermo Söhnlein, co-founder of the company OceanGate, which owns the submarine, when it operates at these depths, the pressure is so great that any failure would cause an instant implosionto. “If that is what happened, it would have happened four days ago,” he assured the BBC shortly before learning of the discovery of the remains.
Implosion is the opposite of explosion. Occurs when an object collapses and contracts toward its center by the action of external or internal forces. In this case, it occurs when the external pressure of the sea at a certain depth exceeds the atmosphere inside the submarine. Any small crack in the hull or in the acrylic viewport could have caused that fateful change in pressure.
As the diver Michael Harris explained to Fox, any damage would have catastrophic results, since the carbon fiber and titanium with which the submarine is built would end up giving way.
At almost 4,000 meters deep, the pressure is about 400 atmospheres, about 400 times greater than on the surface. Which means that for every square centimeter of surface a pressure of 400 kilograms is exerted.
This water pressure at the depth in which the Titanic is located could have exceeded the resistance of the hull of the submarine and would have deformed the structure until it collapsed. In that case, the passengers would have died on the spot.
In this video you can see how an implosion of a tank under vacuum occurs.
