A submersible carrying five people to the wreckage of the Titanic imploded near the site of the shipwreck and killed everyone on board, authorities said Thursday, according to The Associated Press.
Coast Guard officials said during a news conference that they”ve notified the families of the crew of the Titan, which has been missing since Sunday.
The sliver of hope that remained for finding the crew alive was wiped away earlier in the day, when the submersible”s 96-hour supply of oxygen was expected to run out and the Coast Guard announced that a debris field had been found roughly 1,600 feet from the Titanic.
The Coast Guard said the submersible likely imploded in the North Atlantic waters.
“The debris is consistent with the catastrophic loss of the pressure chamber,” said Rear Adm. John Mauger, of the First Coast Guard District.
Authorities had hoped that underwater sounds detected on Tuesday and Wednesday might help narrow their search but the Coast Guard indicated on Thursday that the sounds were likely generated by something other than the Titan.
OceanGate Expeditions, the company that owned and operated the submersible, said in a statement that all five people in the vessel, including CEO Stockton Rush, “have sadly been lost.”
The others on board were two members of a prominent Pakistani family, Shahzada Dawood and his son Suleman Dawood British adventurer Hamish Harding and Titanic expert Paul-Henri Nargeolet.
Director James Cameron, who directed the 1997 film “Titanic”, told ABC News, “I”m struck by the similarity of the Titanic disaster itself, where the captain was repeatedly warned about ice ahead of his ship and yet he steamed at full speed into an ice field.”
The Titan launched on Sunday morning and was reported overdue that afternoon about 435 miles south of St. John”s, Newfoundland, as it was on its way to where the Titanic sank more than a century ago. By Thursday, when the oxygen supply was expected to run out, there was little hope of finding the crew alive.