After a tourist submarine vanished on Sunday on a dive to the Titanic’s wreck, a significant search and rescue effort is currently underway in the middle of the Atlantic.
The US Coast Guard reported that contact with the tiny submarine was lost around an hour and a half into its descent. According to the tour company OceanGate, every possibility was being considered to save the five aboard.
Tickets for an eight-day tour that includes dives to the wreck at a depth of 3,800m (12,500ft) cost $250,000 (£195,000).
According to officials, the rescue effort is being assisted by governmental organisations, the US and Canadian navies, and commercial deep-sea companies.
The Titanic’s wreck is located around 435 miles (700 km) south of St. John’s, Newfoundland, though Boston, Massachusetts, is in charge of the rescue effort.
OceanGate’s Titan submersible, a truck-sized sub that can seat five people and often dives with a four-day emergency supply of oxygen, is thought to be the missing vessel.
Experts worried that the Titanic tourist submersible may only have a day’s worth of oxygen left as the search for it began on Wednesday.
After the 22-foot submersible Titan lost communication with a support ship while transporting five passengers to the Titanic debris site, U.S. and Canadian teams started looking for the craft on Sunday.
The U.S. Coast Guard said early Wednesday that underwater noises had been heard in the North Atlantic Ocean while American and Canadian teams looked for a tiny boat carrying five passengers that had disappeared two days earlier during a dive to the Titanic disaster site.
The Coast Guard announced on Twitter soon before 12:30 a.m. ET that “underwater noises in the search area” were observed by a Canadian aircraft. Remotely driven vehicle operations were prompted by the noises to look for the source of the noises.
An official US government letter on the hunt claims that on Tuesday, sonar detected banging sounds coming from below the surface of the North Atlantic Ocean while looking for a submersible with five persons on board that vanished two days earlier while diving to the Titanic debris.
Every 30 minutes, banging sounds were heard by the crew, and four hours later, even after more sonar devices had been deployed, thumping could still be heard.
