The Horizon Arctic ship entered the Canadian port of St. John’s on Wednesday with several pieces of the Titan submersible found on the seabed 450 meters from the Titanic.
The remains – made of carbon fiber and titanium – were handed over to the authorities in charge of investigating the accident in which five people died on Sunday, June 18, while descending to the wreck of the most famous cruise ship in the world.
The Horizon Arctic set sail from St. John’s the June 20 and arrived at the search site the next day. He had with him the ROV Odysseus, a remote-controlled robot that was sent from New York shortly after the submersible was reported missing and was instrumental in the outcome of the search.
“It has been a long mission for the men and women aboard the Horizon Arctic,” the crew members said.
The ROV ended the rescue mission on Thursday when it detected wreckage from the submersible on the ocean floor some 450 meters off the bow of the Titanic in the morning.
The US and Canadian Transportation Safety Boards, as well as the US Coast Guard and Canadian Police are investigating the incident.
“Our team has successfully completed offshore operations, but remains on mission and will be in the process of demobilizing the Horizon Arctic this morning,” said a spokesperson for Pelagic Research, the company that owns the deep-sea robot.
He noted that the team members “have been working tirelessly for 10 days, through the physical and mental challenges of this operation, and are looking forward to finishing the mission and returning to their loved ones.”
The Horizon Arctic is owned by the same company as the Polar Prince, the ship that on June 18 towed the submersible out to sea and glided over it as it plunged toward the Titanic.
Tom Maddox, founder and CEO of Underwater Forensic Investigations, told CBC News earlier this week that experts from the United States, Canada, France and England involved in accident investigation They could try to put the ship back together to find out the precise moment it imploded and be able to determine where the bodies of the victims would be found.
“Just like in a plane crash, they may try to reassemble the sub to put the pieces together like a puzzle and determine where the point of failure was,” he explained.
“In the case of a massive implosion, it will not be an easy task because a large part of the ship would have disintegrated,” he explained.
Also, former TSB Canadian investigator Marc-André Poisson said the US teams would likely lead the process alongside their Canadian colleagues, rather than conduct separate investigations.
He considered that the remains exposed on Wednesday will play an important role, but stressed that they will not tell the whole story.
“The Titan is only one component of the failure. (…) There could be multiple human factors involved that helped create the causes, conditions and contributing factors to the accident,” Poisson said.
He added that in these cases the researchers build a sequence of events from the factsthey will create hypotheses about what might have happened and then test them in the laboratory.
It’s all part of an effort to “build a full understanding of how the system failed,” he said.
Although the US Coast Guard said it would be difficult to recover the bodies, Dr. Ken LeDez, a specialist in hyperbaric medicine at St. John’s, said this might be possible.
“I think it would be unwise to rule out the possibility that they can recover recognizable bodies. I think it’s possible. It all depends on the exact second (in which the Titan imploded), on how things happened,” said the deep-sea doctor.
All five people on board are believed to have died in a sudden implosion caused by “catastrophic loss of the pressure chamber.”
Among the victims is Stockton Rush, CEO of OceanGate Expeditions, whose company built the Titan with an experimental design made from carbon fiber and titanium.
Rush acknowledged in several interviews that the materials were not those commonly used to build deep-sea submersibles.
“I’d like to be remembered as an innovator. I’ve broken some rules to do this. I think I’ve broken them with logic and good engineering behind it. Carbon fiber and titanium, there’s a rule you don’t do that. Well, I did it”, he had said in 2021.
Rush was the pilot of the ship on the voyage and died along with passengers Shahzada Dawood and her son Suleman Dawood, businessman Hamish Harding, and Titanic researcher Paul-Henri Nargeolet.
