"That is why you need a submersible that has really thick walls." "To put that into perspective, that is about 200 times the pressure of what is in a car tyre," Robert Blasiak, an ocean researcher at the Stockholm Resilience Centre at Stockholm University, told the BBC Radio 4's Today programme. On the seabed 3,800m (12,500ft) underwater, the Titanic and everything around endures pressures of around 40MPa, which are 390 times greater than those on the surface. The deeper an object travels in the ocean, the greater the pressure of the water around it grows. We had to flail around blindly at the bottom of the ocean knowing the Titanic is somewhere there, but it is so pitch dark that the biggest thing under the ocean was just 500 yards (1,500ft) away and we spent 90 minutes looking for it." Mike Reiss, a TV comedy writer who worked on The Simpsons and took part in a trip with OceanGate to the Titanic last year, told the BBC: "When you touch bottom, you don't really know where you are. OceanGate's Titan submersible carries a state-of-the-art self-contained inertial navigation system which it combines with an acoustic sensor known as a Doppler Velocity Log to estimate the depth and speed of the vehicle relative to the sea floor.Įven so, passengers onboard previous trips to the Titanic with OceanGate have described just how hard it is to find their way upon reaching the ocean floor. Submersible pilots also rely upon a technique known as inertial navigation, using a system of accelerometers and gyroscopes to track their position and orientation in relation to a known starting point and velocity. Sonar also allows the crew to detect features and objects beyond the small pool of light illuminated by the submersible. Watch Mike Reiss describe his own journey to the Titanic on an earlier expedition in the video aboveĭetailed maps of the Titanic wreck site put together by decades of high-resolution scanning, however, can provide waypoints as objects come into view. With limited line of sight beyond the few metres illuminated by the truck-sized submersible's onboard lights, navigating at this depth is a challenging task, making it easy to become disoriented on the seabed. Previous expeditions to the wreck site have described descending for more than two hours through total darkness before the ocean floor suddenly appears beneath the lights of the submersible. The Titanic lies within a region known as the "midnight zone" for this very reason. Beyond this point, the ocean is in perpetual darkness. Sunlight is very quickly absorbed by water and is unable to penetrate much deeper than about 1,000m (3,300ft) from the surface. With the disappearance of a five-person submersible while carrying paying passengers on a trip to the Titanic wreck, the BBC looks at what this region of the ocean floor is like. But the Titanic's final resting place carries dangers of its own, meaning visits to the world's most famous shipwreck present a significant challenge. Icebergs still pose a hazard to shipping – in 2019 1,515 icebergs drifted far enough south to enter transatlantic shipping lanes during the months of March to August. The wreck now lies nearly 3.8km (12,500ft) beneath the waves at a site nearly 400 miles (640km) southeast of the Newfoundland coast. In under three hours the ship had sunk, taking more than 1,500 passengers and crew to their deaths. Then, on the cold, moonless night on 14 April 1912, a 125m-long (410ft) iceberg – all that remained of the estimated 500m (1,640ft) chunk of ice that left a fjord in Greenland the previous year – collided with the passenger ship RMS Titanic as it made its maiden voyage from Southampton in the UK to New York, USA. Over the following months, it slowly drifted south, melting gradually as it was carried by the ocean currents and the wind. At some point in Autumn 1911, an enormous chunk of ice cleaved away from a glacier on the southwest of Greenland's vast ice sheet.
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