(NewsNation) — A diving expert says where the debris from the Titanic tour submersible is found may tell a story that could lead to figuring out the point of failure on the fatal expedition.
“Where the pieces lie on the bottom tells the story,” Tom Maddox, founder of Underwater Forensic Investigators, said on “Elizabeth Vargas Reports.”
OceanGate Expeditions confirmed debris found near the Titanic wreckage is from the tourist submersible Titan. The U.S. Coast Guard said the debris is consistent with a “catastrophic loss of the pressure chamber.” All five of the submersible’s passengers are believed to be dead.
In 2005, Maddox co-piloted a submersible to the Titanic wreck site and knows how risky the trip can be, explaining that the deep ocean is a hostile environment.
“It’s unforgiving,” he said. “There’s no way you can manipulate or move the environment around to suit you. You’re encapsulated. You’re a visitor. And there are so many things that can go wrong.”
He continued, “The harshest environment in the world is the deep ocean.”
Maddox thinks the first step in finding out why the Titan’s most recent expedition had such a tragic outcome is recovery.
“What they want to do is probably return to the scene that they got some debris from and then see if they can find the cookie crumbs that will take them out along the ocean floor to find the other pieces. Mapping of the pieces will tell its own story,” Maddox said.
So far, experts believe the pattern of the debris field and the location roughly 1,600 feet from the bow of the Titanic were consistent with a catastrophic implosion in the water column.
“My personal feeling and one that I dreaded was that there was some kind of catastrophic failure on the descent, that would have meant the sub would have become incapacitated at that point,” Maddox said. “In an implosion like that, pieces would be scattered. Depending on the materials of the submersible itself and what was left intact and what wasn’t, there are going to be different levels of buoyancy to those pieces. Many of the pieces could be drifting along or drifted along in currents and just angled down differently, so it’s very possible that there’s a large debris field that’s going to have to be investigated. It’s going to take some time to do that.”
The pressure at the bottom of the Atlantic is 400 times greater than on the surface.
Maddox explained that if there’s a breach in the hall, the inside of the submersible actually becomes a vacuum compared to the pressure on the outside. If there’s even the slightest breach, nature takes over, physics takes over and that outside pressure of the ocean rushes in within milliseconds to implode and fill in the vacuum in the submersible. That rush of pressure causes the submersible to implode.
The pressure also creates dynamic heat as hot as the sun and crushes the vessel instantaneously, Maddox explained.
Search efforts for the Titan, 900 miles east of Cape Cod, covered an area twice the size of Connecticut and two and a half miles deep. The submersible’s passengers reportedly included British businessman Hamish Harding, OceanGate CEO Stockton Rush, Pakistani businessman Shahzada Dawood and his son Suleman Dawood, and pilot and Titanic expert Paul-Henri Nargeolet.
“Anytime there’s a disaster like this, we hope that the souls that perished were not in vain and that we can learn from this,” Maddox said.
