Catastrophic Implosion of a submersible explained:
When a submarine hull collapses, it moves inward at about 1,500 miles per hour - that’s 2,200 feet per second.
The time required for complete collapse is 20 / 2,200 seconds = about 1 millisecond.
A human brain responds instinctually to stimulus at about 25 milliseconds. Human rational response (sense?reason?act) is at best 150 milliseconds.
The air inside a sub has a fairly high concentration of hydrocarbon vapors.
When the hull collapses it behaves like a very large piston on a very large Diesel engine.
The air auto-ignites and an explosion follows the initial rapid implosion. Large blobs of fat (that would be humans) incinerate and are turned to ash and dust quicker than you can blink your eye.
Former US Navy Captain David Marquet tells TalkTV that people should not expect to find any remains following the deaths aboard the Titan submersible. He warned that people underestimate the power of the sea, and speaking about the damage caused by an underwater implosion in the depths of the ocean he said: "I hate to say it but there's no bodies to recover. The implosion is so rapid." When they say catastrophic implosion, it is a instantaneous destruction of the vessel and an instantaneous death for everyone on board."
The first hint of a timeline came Thursday evening when a senior U.S. Navy official said that after the Titan was reported missing Sunday, the Navy went back and analyzed its acoustic data and found an “anomaly” that was consistent with an implosion or explosion in the general vicinity of where the vessel was operating when communications were lost. The official spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss a sensitive acoustic detection system.
The Navy official who spoke of the “anomaly” heard Sunday said the Navy passed on the information to the Coast Guard, which continued its search because the Navy did not consider the data to be definitive.
David Lochridge, OceanGate’s former director of marine operations, argued in 2018 that the method the company devised for ensuring the soundness of the hull — relying on acoustic monitoring that could detect cracks and pops as the hull strained under pressure — was inadequate and could “subject passengers to potential extreme danger in an experimental submersible.”
“This was problematic because this type of acoustic analysis would only show when a component is about to fail — often milliseconds before an implosion — and would not detect any existing flaws prior to putting pressure onto the hull,” Lochridge’s attorneys wrote in a wrongful termination claim.
In this episode, Sal Mercogliano - maritime historian at Campbell University (@campbelledu) and former merchant mariner - recaps the issues surrounding the loss of the submersible Titan. He also discusses the issue of classification, the search and rescue efforts for the craft, the detection of the implosion by the US Navy SOSUS array, and how the US and Canada investigation will proceed.
