The submersible vessel carrying five people that vanished en route to the Titanic shipwreck has enough oxygen to sustain those aboard for only about 40 more hours, the U.S. Coast Guard said on Tuesday afternoon.
The 21-foot tourist vessel lost contact with its parent ship on Sunday morning — about an hour and 45 minutes into its nearly 13,000-foot plunge to the site of the Titanic. After two days of inconclusive searching, the U.S. and Canadian Coast Guards have launched a joint effort alongside commercial, research and private vessels and aircraft to locate and recover the submersible.
“While the U.S. Coast Guard has assumed the role of search-and-rescue mission coordinator, we do not have all of the necessary expertise and equipment required in a search of this nature,” Capt. Jamie Frederick said at a Coast Guard news conference in Boston on Tuesday. “The unified command brings that expertise and additional capability together to maximize effort in solving this very complex problem.”
The submersible vessel, which is called Titan, is not equipped with a GPS, and instead relied on text message communication with its parent ship, the Canadian-owned expedition vessel MV Polar Prince. The Polar Prince requested Coast Guard assistance on Sunday after an initial search for the vessel, which went down in the North Atlantic approximately 900 miles east of Cape Cod, Mass., Frederick said.
If the vessel is located underwater, however, bringing it to the surface could pose a challenge — the Coast Guard does not currently have the equipment to lift the submarine back to the surface, and declined to comment on how far away the nearest naval asset capable of doing so might be.
Coordinated Coast Guard efforts are searching a combined 7,600 square miles — an area larger than the state of Connecticut — with the help of C130 aircraft searching by sight and radar and P3 aircraft dropping monitor sonar buoys. On Tuesday, Frederick said, the commercial pipe-laying vessel Deep Energy convened with the Polar Prince to begin a remotely operated dive at the last known location of the submarine. Other vehicles with ROV capabilities are also preparing to join in the search.
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