The Coast Guard has recovered remaining debris, including presumed human remains, from a submersible that imploded on its way to explore the wreck of the Titanic, killing all five onboard, deep beneath the Atlantic Ocean’s surface, officials said Tuesday.
The Coast Guard said that the recovery and transfer of remaining parts was completed last Wednesday, and a photo showed the intact aft titanium endcap of the 22-foot (6.7-meter) vessel. Additional presumed human remains were carefully recovered from within Titan’s debris and transported for analysis by U.S. medical professionals, the Coast Guard said.
The salvage mission conducted under an agreement with the U.S. Navy was a follow-up to initial recovery operations on the ocean floor roughly 1,600 feet (488 meters) away from the Titanic, the Coast Guard said.
I read the report you mentioned and I don’t think this accident is a good comparison because the people in the Titan went from 1 atm to 400 atm while the victims of the Byford Dolphin accident went from 9 atm of pressure to 1 atm. Three (possibly four) of them were intact and died because all the fat in the blood suddenly precipitated, completely stopping circulation. Another guy was blasted through an opening that was much smaller than he, and was very much discombobulated as a result.
There’s an order of magnitude difference between the incidents in pressure differentials and it was more like an instantaneous compression in the Titan than an explosive decompression like the Dolphin. So whatever happened in the Titan probably left an entirely different mess than that seen in the dolphin autopsy.
That’s why I qualified my statement. I think the fourth victim is probably the closest analog we have decent reference for. (No one was ever recovered from the Thresher, which also wasn’t at this same level of pressure as Titan when it imploded.)
Yeah, that 400 bar decompression would be like being inside an exploding bomb (except exploding in). Instantly turned into a smoothie.