The ‘instant implosion’: what causes the reaction that destroyed the Titan and what it means in the investigation

But what could happen? What is an instantaneous implosion? Why does it occur? what are its consequences?

The first thing we have to understand is what an instantaneous or “catastrophic” implosion is, as the search teams have called it. José Luis Martín, merchant marine and submarine expert explains it in an interview with NIUS. “It’s like an explosion, like the one we all know, but that occurs from within the object itself towards itself. It’s when something collapses towards itself due to the action of an external force, in this case the pressure of the sea. It’s like if we crumpled a plastic cup by hand,” says this man who was chief engineer of a tourist passenger submarine.

Antonio Crucelaegui, director of the School of Naval Engineers, He describes it this way to NIUS: “The receptacle cannot withstand the external pressure and collapses. And when it collapses, it implodes. The submarine disintegrates in a matter of milliseconds. Its occupants die instantly, without even realizing it, due to that spectacular pressure.” Crucelaegi explains that these are reactions that can reach enormous powers. The one that destroyed the Argentine ARA San Juan was equivalent to an explosion of 5,000 tons of TNT.

What was that pressure? It depends on the depth at which the fatal incident occurred. The deeper, the more tons of water on the submersible. For every ten meters of depth, the pressure increases by one kilo. At a thousand meters, it is one hundred kilos. The implosion of the Titan was surely something deeper still.

It is known that the last signal emitted by the bathyscaphe was more than half way down to the bottom of the sea: one hour and 45 minutes in a journey of just over two hours. It is a key fact. Everything indicates that the implosion occurred at a depth of around two thousand meters and at the beginning of the journey, because if it had happened later, when sonars were already deployed in the area, they would have detected it.

The way in which the remains have been located also provides information about what happened. It confirms that it did not implode in a collision with the seabed. If this had been the case, the structures would be very close, but they are scattered.

That is why Martín recounts the most probable sequence with the information available at this time: “The submarine has been going down and for whatever reason it has had a water ingress: a failure of materials, a micro-break, a crack in the hull… That It has caused the external pressure to be transferred to the interior instantly. It is the same as when you puncture a balloon. And there the implosion has occurred”.

Any failure, no matter how small, can trigger disaster. What was it specifically? An investigation should clarify it. “Inside the submarine the pressure is one atmosphere and outside it can be up to 400. The difference is so beastly that whatever happens crushes you”, says Crucelaegui.

The catastrophic implosion of the submarine kills everyone inside instantly. That is not disputed by anyone. Neither did the Coast Guard and the company itself, OceanGate. All of them have presumed dead the five passengers who were traveling in the submarine looking for the remains of the Titanic. José Luis Martín explains it very graphically. “You die instantly, the pressure crushes you, it bursts you. Imagine a body and a weight of 100 tons falls on top of it, suddenly and with a blow. It literally crushes you, it bursts you. Any body when it exceeds its breaking limit by nature is destroyed. And since there is so much pressure in the sea, it crushes the bodies”.

Crucelaegui provides another description that allows us to understand it. When it implodes, the submersible “goes from having a volume of three or four cubic meters to zero, to occupying zero volume. It happens with all submarines from a depth of 500 meters,” he explains.

The Coast Guard considers it very difficult due to the extreme conditions of the oceanic abyss. Martín considers that “the bodies can be found, but they will be crushed and deformed by the pressure.”

“I know that many questions remain about how and why this has happened,” Rear Admiral Mauger acknowledged last night, who sent to have answers to the investigation that is beginning now and that will continue to be led by the United States Coast Guard and will continue only with the means robotized, remote controlled.

This is when the safety advisories that the OceanGate company received, including one from one of its employees, who was laid off, can have special value. The construction of the Titan, an experimental model not approved, had raised many doubts. To begin with, because the main material of its construction is the carbon fiber, cheaper than titanium or steel, but whose resistance to great depths has not been as proven.

Stockton Rush, president of OceanGate and one of those killed, had acknowledged that carbon fiber had not been used for submersibles and that the Titan’s hull material had shown signs of cyclical fatigue in 2020.

Another issue that did not convince some experts was the shape of the boat. Bathyscaphes that descend to extreme depths are usually spherical so that sea pressure is distributed equally at all points. The Titan, however, was a cylinder, and some parts of the hull were under greater pressure than others.