A robot is combing the seabed for debris from the Titan submersible implosion as a multinational investigation begins

() — A robot is combing the seabed for debris from the fatal implosion of the Titan submersible as US and Canadian authorities turn their attention from search and rescue to investigating what led to the maritime disaster and searching for determine if any law was violated.

The US Coast Guard has convened a Marine Board of Inquiry to investigate the implosion, the “highest level of investigation conducted by the Coast Guard,” Chief Investigator Capt. Jason Neubauer announced Sunday. .

The board will work to determine the cause of the catastrophic implosion and deaths, as well as make recommendations “to apply civil or criminal penalties as necessary,” Neubauer said.

For now, the researchers are prioritizing the recovery of debris from the seabed. Military experts found wreckage of the submersible about 500 meters from the Titanic’s bow last Thursday, the US Coast Guard said earlier.

“My primary goal is to prevent something similar from happening by making the necessary recommendations to improve maritime domain security around the world,” Neubauer said Sunday.

The salvage operation occurs when questions remain about the design of the submersible, the materials used in its construction, what caused the implosion, and exactly when it occurred.

The Titan had been 1 hour and 45 minutes into its descent toward the Titanic wreckage on the ocean floor last Sunday when it lost contact with its mother ship, kicking off a day-long multinational search and rescue operation. in the North Atlantic that ended on Thursday with the discovery of its debris.

The US Coast Guard investigation is one of several currently underway. Canadian authorities also tasked with investigating the incident will review voice recordings from the submersible’s mother ship, the Polar Prince, Canadian officials said.

Canadian researchers boarded the Polar Prince on Saturday “to gather information from the ship’s voyage data recorder and other ship systems that contain useful information,” Kathy Fox, president of Canada’s Transportation Safety Board, said Saturday. A voyage data recorder stores audio from the ship’s bridge.

Meanwhile, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) is investigating whether “federal or provincial criminal laws may have been breached.”

“There is no suspicion of criminal activity per se, but the RCMP is taking initial steps to assess whether or not we will go down that path,” RCMP Superintendent Kent Osmond said at a news conference Saturday.

US and Canadian authorities have also been conducting interviews in the port of St. John’s, Canada, where the Polar Prince returned on Saturday with its flags at half mast.

“This case has been extremely complex, as it involved a coordinated international, interagency and private sector response in an unforgiving and difficult-to-reach region of the ocean,” US Coast Guard Rear Admiral John Mauger said Sunday. Commander of the 1st Coast Guard District.

The Coast Guard announced that the vessel suffered a “catastrophic implosion”, killing all passengers on board.

The crew members of the vessel were the CEO of OceanGate Expeditions, Stockton Rush; British businessman Hamish Harding; the French diver Paul-Henri Nargeolet; and Pakistani-born businessman Shahzada Dawood and his son Suleman, who were British citizens.

What is happening at the bottom of the ocean?

Pelagic’s remotely operated vehicle, Odysseus 6, leaves the ocean after searching for debris from the Titan submersible on June 22, 2023. (Credit: Pelagic Research Services)

The same remote-controlled vehicle that found the submersible debris field last week is now involved in the operation to recover debris from the Atlantic Ocean, according to a statement from Pelagic Research Services, first seen by , on Sunday.

The Odysseus 6K, a remotely operated vehicle, was on the seabed on its fourth dive since arriving at the Titan salvage site on Sunday, according to a statement from Pelagic Research Services, first seen by , on Sunday.

The company added that Odysseus’ heavy lift capabilities “have been and continue to be used” in the Titan recovery mission, but would not confirm whether the debris had been recovered, referring to the US Coast Guard. leading research on the implosion and recovery effort.

Captain Neubauer declined to give details about the recovery operation on Sunday, but said “resources are on site and capable of recovering the debris.”

Five different major pieces of debris from the submersible were found Thursday morning, authorities said. Each end of the pressurized hull was found in a different location, according to Paul Hankins, director of Salvage Operations and Ocean Engineering for the US Navy.

Remotely operated vehicle missions are expected to continue for another week, according to Jeff Mahoney, a spokesman for Pelagic Research Services.

Any attempt to recover anything from the debris field will warrant a larger operation in conjunction with Deep Energy, another company helping with the mission, because the debris will likely be too heavy for the Pelagic ROV to lift alone, Mahoney told on Monday. last Friday.

Pieces of the submersible will be examined as researchers try to understand why it imploded.

The US Navy said it detected an acoustic signal consistent with an implosion on Sunday in the general area where the submersible was diving when it lost communication, a senior Navy official told .

The sound was determined to be “not definitive,” the official said, and multinational efforts to find the sub continued as a search and rescue operation before the debris field was found.

The boat used materials that “just” didn’t work, says an expert

As the debris field is mapped and submersible parts are collected, experts are raising questions about the Titan’s design.

A review of OceanGate’s marketing material, public statements made by Rush and court records show that even as the company touted a commitment to security measures, it pushed back against industry standards that would have imposed greater scrutiny on its operations and vessels.

A former employee who briefly worked for the company as an operations technician was concerned about the helmet’s thickness and adhesion, he said, speaking to on condition of anonymity.

“This was an undertaking that was already challenging a lot of what we already know about submersible design,” Rachel Lance, a biomedical engineer at Duke University who has studied the physiological requirements for survival underwater, told on Thursday. She noted that some of the craft’s design materials “were already big red flags for people who have worked in this field.”

The expert said that the unconventional combinations of materials used in the Titan, including carbon fiber, posed safety risks because “in the course of repeated pressurizations, they tend to weaken.”

“This is not exactly what, in my opinion, would be an innovation because this is already something that has been tried and it just didn’t work,” he said.

When submersible expert Karl Stanley was aboard the Titan for an underwater excursion off the coast of the Bahamas in April 2019, he sensed something was wrong with the submersible when loud noises were heard and sent an email to Rush, the CEO of OceanGate Expeditions, sounding the alarm about suspected defects.

“What we heard, in my opinion…sounded like a glitch/flaw in an area that was being hit with tremendous stress and being crushed/damaged,” Stanley wrote in the email, a copy of which was obtained by .

When asked for comment on Stanley’s email, an OceanGate spokesperson told that they could not provide any additional information at this time.

OceanGate co-founder Guillermo Sohnlein urged people not to be quick to judge the implosion. “There are teams at the site that will still be collecting data for the next few days, weeks, maybe months, and it will be a long time before we know exactly what happened there,” Sohnlein told on Friday. “So I would encourage us to postpone speculation until we have more data to go on.”

— ‘s Isabelle Chapman, Curt Devine, Zenebou Sylla, Gloria Pazmino, Cole Higgins, Zoe Sottile, Rob Frehse, Paul P. Murphy, Gabe Cohen and Christina Maxouris contributed to this report.