By: Bowen Wang

A mysterious ending faces the Titan submersible, a ship created by the company OceanGate, that takes people to see the wreck of the famous USS Titanic shipwreck. Now it has been confirmed that the Titan sank and everyone on board probably died.

The Titanic sank in the Atlantic Ocean, but very few have witnessed the shipwreck. Many companies began racing to make a submersible that could carry people down to the ocean floor – a place where the pressure is almost like having an Empire State Building on you.

The Titan was created by OceanGate, a company that builds underwater vessels. It was a submersible that looked like a hook and had vertical and horizontal thrusters that could move off the mothership, into the ocean and down to the Titanic’s ruins. The Titan had a small glass porthole window allowing passengers to peer down at the Titanic wreck. The Titan was about 6.7m long and reached a depth of 4000m. It could hold up to five people. Passengers of the Titan were OceanGate CEO Stockton Rush, British billionaire Hamish Harding, French explorer Paul-Henri Nargeolet, and Pakistani businessman Shahzada Dawood and his son Suleman. All these people died in the catastrophic implosion of the Titan.

The Titan search started after it lost connection with the mothership on Monday, June 18. Countries from all around the world sent ships and other crafts, including ROVs and aircrafts, to search for the lost sub. The first sign that the Titan imploded were the debris of the tail cone, found about half a kilometer away from the Titanic wreck. Other debris were found around the Titanic, implying the Titan successfully sunk, since the pieces that were found were all very important components of the Titan. The Titan also must have lost those components by imploding. During the implosion, the passengers would have died. Even if they miraculously survived, the pressure at that depth of the ocean would have surely killed them.

The titan submersible faced a tragic ending – both in the deaths of the passengers and the failure of its mission.