Why did the bathyscaphe explode? "Titanium"

From the very beginning, experts warned that the crew members of the missing bathyscaphe would be able to breathe only until 14:00 Thursday, then oxygen supplies would run out. But – if the submarine is intact. The fact that it exploded was confirmed by the US Coast Guard.

How will experts be able to find out exactly what happened to the bathyscaphe? After the discovery of the wreckage of the Titan at the bottom of the ocean, efforts will be focused on finding out the causes of the accident.

Rear Admiral John Mauger claims what has been found to date is consistent with a “catastrophic explosion”: two sites debrisone containing the Titan’s tail cone and the other containing its landing frame, suggesting that the craft had exploded.

According to Ryan Ramsey, a former Royal Navy submarine captain, to answer the question of why this happened, it is necessary to collect all the wreckage that can be found. He says:

“There is no black box, so you can’t track the latest movements of the ship itself.”

Otherwise, however, the investigation process is not much different from the process of investigating a plane crash. Ramsey like writes The Air Force explains that once investigators bring the pieces back to the surface, they will be looking for a fracture site in the carbon fiber structure, which is key to understanding what happened in those final moments. Every detail will be carefully examined to determine the direction of the carbon fiber strands and find breaks that indicate the exact location where the break occurred.

The main question is whether structural failure was the cause. If that were the case, the submersible would be subjected to incredibly high pressures, equivalent to the weight of the Eiffel Tower, says Professor Blair Thornton of the University of Southampton:

“We’re talking about a very powerful main body explosion.”

The critical question is: if so, is it due to a lack of proper testing, as some experts suggest? Professor Roderick A. Smith of Imperial College London states:

“Carbon fiber fails due to internal defects in its construction. The force of the explosion means that it can be very difficult to determine the sequence of events. Hence the need for searching and careful study, if possible.

Which department will lead the investigation, since there are no protocols for such incidents with an underwater vehicle, is not yet clear. But since the US Coast Guard has played a leading role in the operation so far, it is likely to continue to play an important role.

James Cameron, director of the hit 1997 film Titanic, says the news of the Titan submersible explosion “definitely didn’t come as a surprise.” He himself made 33 dives to the wreck, and said CNN that when he first heard the news of the Titan incident on Monday morning, he contacted his small community in the deep diving group and learned about half an hour later that the submersible had simultaneously lost communication and tracking.

“The only scenario I could think of that could explain this is an implosion,” he said on Thursday. “The shockwave is so powerful that it actually disabled the secondary system, which has its own pressure vessel and its own battery pack, which is the transponder that the ship uses to track the location of the submarine.” Cameron said he continued to dig and got some additional information that seemed to confirm that the submarine had exploded.

“I called on everyone to raise a glass to their memory on Monday,” Cameron said of his community group. He said false hopes continued to falter as search parties searched for the missing passengers over the following days. “In the following days, I watched all this searching for everyone running around, knowing full well that it was in vain, but hoping, against all odds, that I was wrong,” Cameron said. He expressed his condolences to the families of the passengers.

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