The Canadian ship Horizon Arctic has deployed a remotely operated underwater vehicle that has reached the sea floor and has started its search for the missing OceanGate submersible, the U.S. Coast Guard said Thursday morning.
A French vessel, L’Atalante, also joined the search and deployed an ROV to the effort.
The estimated oxygen supply on the missing submersible is likely to reach its estimated maximum 96-hour mark, and as of Thursday morning, there were no further leads on the location of the vessel.
The submersible, called the Titan, went missing off the coast of St. John’s early Sunday morning during a dive to the wreck of the Titanic.
The Associated Press reported the air supply was expected to end between 6 a.m. and 8 a.m. EDT today, based on the information given by the U.S. Coast Guard and OceanGate Expeditions, the submersible’s owner and operator.
The Titan is carrying five passengers: Hamish Harding, a billionaire and explorer; Paul-Henry (PH) Nargeolet, a French explorer; Shahzada Dawood and his son, Suleman, members of a prominent Pakistani family; and OceanGate CEO and Titan pilot Stockton Rush.
ROVs JOIN SEARCH
On Tuesday, a Canadian aircraft picked up “underwater noises” from one area of the search. Officials quickly supplied the area with teams in hopes of finding the location of the submersible.
More sounds were heard on Wednesday but officials could not determine if they were coming from the submersible.
Following the leads, officials have supplied the area where the noises were heard with ROVs from Canadian vessel Horizon Arctic and French ship L’Atalante.
The ships join the Canadian CGS Ann Harvey, Canadian CGS Terry Fox, His Majesty’s Canadian Ship Glace Bay, which carry a mobile decompression chamber and medical personnel, and an ROV from Magellan, a press release from the U.S. Coast Guard said.
An Air National Guard C-130 and Canadian Royal Air Force (RCAF) planes are also on scene.
‘A CRITICAL DAY’
On Thursday, co-founder of OceanGate Guillermo Sohnlein wrote on Facebook, “today will be a critical day.”
“I’m certain that Stockton (Rush) and the rest of the crew realized days ago that the best thing they can do to ensure their rescue is to extend the limits of those (oxygen) supplies by relaxing as much as possible,” Sohnlein said. “I firmly believe that the time window available for their rescue is longer than what most people think.”
Officials said Wednesday that efforts to find the submersible would scale up hour-by-hour overnight into Thursday morning.
The submersible was headed to the site of the 1912 sinking of the Titanic, located approximately 600 kilometres off the coast of Newfoundland at a depth of about 3,800 metres.
The crew aboard the support ship, the Polar Prince, lost contact with the submersible on Sunday an hour and 45 minutes into its dive.
OceanGate Expeditions, has been running tours to the British ocean-liner since 2021. Since the disappearance, details have emerged from a 2018 engineering report alleging issues with the submersible’s structure.
