Titanic Submarine: The allure of the deep even after cheating death

British engineer Roger Mallinson was trapped in a submarine at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean for three days in the summer of 1973 after his Canadian-made ship, the Pisces III, sank off the coast of Ireland. He remembers the cold and the hunger. Lying in silence as he contemplates the ways he could die. The reassuring twitter of dolphins that seemed to hover nearby during the ordeal, allowing him to imagine something beyond the steel ball in which he was imprisoned.

Mallinson, now 85, watched the five-day search for the submarine Titan this week from his home in Troutbeck, England, with an acute sense of dread. It was a sentiment shared by the international community of deep-sea explorers whose experience in the hostile depths has taught them about the unforgiving nature of the deep sea and the need to fight it with extreme precautions.

“I’m very sorry, but I’m not surprised,” Mallinson said when he heard news Thursday that the five people aboard OceanGate’s ship were presumed dead after a multinational rescue effort found evidence of a catastrophic implosion.

Ocean explorers like Mallinson, the filmmaker James Cameron, and others who have made navigating the seabed their life’s mission have imagined more vividly than most what might have happened when the seven-foot, five-man submarine lost contact with its surface craft. as he tried to reach the Titanic – the moment it went wrong, the seconds before the catastrophic implosion, the horror of it all.

On the day the Pisces III sank, the then 35-year-old Mallinson was one of two divers embedding communication cables on the ocean floor, 500 meters below the surface. His shift was over, but when a towline pulled the submarine out of the water, the hatch—which Mallinson had flagged to a boss for repair—broken, causing the ship to plummet back to the bottom of the sea.

Mallinson and his colleague, Roger Chapman, 28, had a cheese sandwich, a can of lemonade and three days of oxygen. Three rescue attempts failed. A fourth worked and they emerged from the submarine with 12 minutes of breathing air left. It was the most successful submarine rescue in history.

The experience did not deter Mallinson from the sea. The allure of the underwater world, once seen with your own eyes, is a strong draw. The aliens light up in phosphorescence with every human vibration, the jelly-like bodies of the beings living in the deep. The impossibly brilliant blue of the Atlantic Ocean in the morning light half a mile below sea level, and the utter blackness of the sea at greater depths and in the darkness of night.

Weeks after the rescue, Mallinson was on another mission. “I did 1,500 hours underwater after that,” he said. “More than before the accident.”

Humans have long been fascinated with “the mystery and otherworldly quality of the deep sea,” wrote Rachel Carson, an American marine biologist, in her 1951 book, “The Sea Around Us.” “The approaching darkness, the increasing pressure, the barrenness of a seascape in which all plant life has been left behind and there are only the unlit outlines of rock and clay, of mud and sand.”

And yet there is a lot at stake to see for yourself. Speaking to reporters shortly after the discovery, Rear Admiral John Mauger of the U.S. Coast Guard had no reassuring words about the prospect of recovering bodies. “This is an incredibly brutal environment down there on the sea floor,” he said.

Implosion, a reverse explosion that causes pressure to move violently inward, would likely have meant instant death, a demise very different from a lack of oxygen while waiting for rescue, but still gruesome.

The incident has drawn attention to the high stakes of deep-sea tourism and the risks and financial costs of multinational rescue missions.

“I think it’s important to remember that the deep sea is a very inhospitable place for us humans,” said Nicolai Roterman, a deep-sea ecologist and lecturer in marine biology at the University of Portsmouth. “Even the most reliable technology can fail, which is why accidents happen. With the growth of deep-sea tourism, we should expect more incidents like this.

“Deep-sea tourism is not without its environmental impact, and like the tragedies and human waste left on Mount Everest, it warrants a conversation about whether this is a worthwhile human endeavor.”

Explorers said it would be wrong to condemn the industry, rather than a rogue company accused of shunning best practices and building a submarine that experts had warned was dangerously designed.

William J. Broad, a New York Times science journalist who has traveled to the deep sea, recounted his experience in an industry-standard submarine. “It felt a bit like being in a spaceship,” Broad said in an interview on the Times’ Daily podcast this week. “There are so many control knobs and banks of switches and backup systems and all that stuff.”

The Titan, on the other hand, used a video game controller adapted for undersea work, Broad said, one of many signs that OceanGate was making the ship “cheap.” (Communications backups, lighting backups and battery backups were also missing, he said.)

Most submarines are certified by standard industry groups that have been around for decades and understand how man-made devices respond to the intense pressure and corrosiveness of seawater. OceanGate did not seek certification, arguing that the process hindered innovation – a decision that drew criticism from industry leaders long before the fateful trip.

“The maritime industry lives and breathes on the certification process because the risks are so high,” said Broad.

James Cameron, the ocean explorer and filmmaker behind “Titanic,” described deep diving as a “mature art” that began in the early 1960s and has a gold standard in safety. Those who practice the art live with the nightmare of what could happen in the back of their minds and take extreme precautions, Cameron said in an interview with ABC News.

OceanGate’s Titan submarine was an exception, he said. “Many people in the community were very concerned about this submarine.”

“I am struck by the similarity of the disaster to the Titanic itself, where the captain was repeatedly warned of ice ahead of his ship and yet steamed into an ice field at full speed on a moonless night, and many people died as a result,” said Cameron .

“And for a very similar tragedy, where warnings were not heeded, to happen in exactly the same place, with all the diving going on around the world, I think it’s just astounding.”

It was human error that caused the 1973 Pisces III disaster, Mallinson said. He had warned several times about the broken hatch and his concerns were ignored, leading to disaster.

What kept the two men alive? Dissatisfied with the onboard air supply, Mallinson stole an extra oxygen tank before the descent.

PART: