Titanic Submarine Search: What It’s Like To Get Snagged 3,800 Meters Deep

The infernal trinity of underwater exploration, according to Toronto’s Joe MacInnis, is fire, submarine hull breach and entanglement.

MacInnis does not know the details of the OceanGate Expeditions submarine that went missing with five people on board during a Sunday trip to view the Titanic wreckage.

But he knows a thing or two about the dangers lurking at the bottom of the Atlantic, having once seen his life briefly flash before his eyes in the deep-sea darkness.

The famous Canadian explorer’s first trip 3,800 meters below the water’s surface to see the Titanic was in 1987 with Paul-Henri Nargeolet, the veteran pilot who has been confirmed as one of five aboard this missing ship.

“If they’re still alive and lying somewhere at the bottom, PH will be the calming, psychological gyroscope,” MacInnis said in an interview. “He’ll hold it together.”

It was on MacInnis’ second Titanic excursion, a few years later, that things got scary.

It was 1991, the year the Soviet Union fell apart. MacInnis was aboard a Russian research vessel exploring the wheelhouse of the world-famous wreck. He was part of a team making an IMAX movie about the Titanic.

Then the submarine hit a snag.

“We tried to go up, but we couldn’t. The sub driver realized he had been caught doing something,” he recalled. ‘It was probably a telephone wire or a tangle of telephone wires to the wheelhouse. The subpilot didn’t see it when we approached.”

There was a moment of panic and utterances of what he believed to be Russian curse words before a second submarine was called in to inspect and identify the problem, then free the entangled ship.

“He kind of worked his way back and forth and out, with the co-pilot’s encouragement,” said MacInnis, who admitted he spent the tense moments “talking to my adrenaline.”

MacInnis, now 86, is closely following the developments of this current search and rescue operation, but with an ominous feel as officials, colleagues, friends and relatives count down what remains of the oxygen reserves aboard OceanGate’s Titan submarine.

A US Coast Guard official said there was enough oxygen left until about 5 a.m. Thursday for those on board, including Nargeolet, OceanGate founder Stockton Rush, British aviation billionaire Hamish Harding, businessman Shahzada Dawood and his teenage son Suleman.

“First of all, we have to get them back, and that should be on everyone’s mind until we get past that wall,” MacInnis said.

“Even if that happens, we need to find out what happened and what we can learn from it. This is really important.”

Officials leading the search said Tuesday they still don’t know if the submarine, which lost contact nearly two hours after its dive, was at the bottom of the sea floor or floating somewhere on the surface of the Atlantic Ocean.

The entrance to the carbon fiber barrel is reportedly sealed from the outside with 17 bolts. Control takes place using a modified PlayStation controller. The submarine was designed using an acoustic modem to remain in text-based communication with the surface ship, and it features a system to monitor hull strength and status using sensors and “strain gauges” to mitigate the effects of the increasing hit the Titan.

OceanGate Expeditions praised this as an “early warning detection” that gives the pilot enough time to return to the surface in the event of a problem.

Troubled by thoughts of the fate of his friend and fellow explorers, MacInnis nevertheless retains fond and vivid memories of his own two descents.

The submarine’s ballast chambers fill with water, adding weight to the ship and allowing gravity to pull it toward the center of the Earth, he said.

“You’re sinking through the Gulf Stream, which is warm, and you’re sinking through the Labrador Current, which is pretty cold,” he said.

“The extraordinary thing for me was to look out the viewing window and see this kind of universe of darkness with these passing electric bioluminescent lights. You feel like you are going to this very different place – almost like another planet.”

The descent to the seabed where the Titanic is located takes about two hours.

“It’s a great experience. It’s quiet and it’s a very reflective time. It is a huge privilege to be able to go to the depths of the ocean.”

At least in theory, a return to the ocean’s surface is “radically simple.” The ballast chambers that collected the water to descend then release the water to rise back to the surface.

But that’s only in theory.

“This is the whole ethos with the ocean,” MacInnis said. “You have to treat these forces of corrosion and pressure and darkness and cold and current – ​​you have to treat them with enormous respect. We were lucky. We were able to solve that problem, but it happened very quickly.”

The world can only marvel at the plight and fate of the Titan crew, though the annals of exploration history offer some guidance.

American astronaut Jim Lowell, reflecting on the experience of leading the Apollo 13 lunar mission, which would have ended in disaster but for the back-of-the-envelope calculations of NASA scientists at mission control and the improvisations of the crew in space, said a fatal end only crossed his mind.

“There’s only one thing you can do in a situation like that. You just go ahead and keep thinking about where to get more consumables,” he said at a post-flight press conference, referring to oxygen. “And that’s what we did.”

A Russian miner who was rescued from a coal mine in southern Russia in 2003 later recounted the hope and the fear – and the final decision that, as a senior member of his crew, he had the responsibility to lead the others in the preserve their battery and oxygen supply.

“We understood that if the oxygen situation didn’t improve, if the water didn’t go down, we had five or six hours left,” Valery Grabovsky told The Associated Press from his hospital bed after being rescued.

Nargeolet would fill that role aboard the Titan, as would Rush, who has served as the submarine’s pilot on previous voyages.

Harding, who participated in the Blue Origin civilian space voyage in 2022, holds a Guinness World Record in 2021 for the longest duration at full ocean depth by a manned vessel. He got it by traveling 4,634 kilometers across the sea floor in a submersible vehicle.

That extreme environmental experience could pay off in a figurative and literal high-pressure situation somewhere in the Atlantic Ocean, MacInnis said.

“Nothing is more contagious than panic.”

Allan Woods is a Montreal-based staff reporter for the Star. He deals with global and national affairs. Follow him on Twitter: @WoodsAllan

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