correction
A previous version of a diagram in this story incorrectly showed 1920 as the date the Titanic sank due to an error in data collection. The correct date, 1912, has been added to the story.
Search-and-rescue vessels from several countries crisscrossed a swath of the North Atlantic in the sky and on the water Thursday as an unmanned vehicle reached the ocean floor, hoping to locate a missing submersible that carried five people before they ran out of oxygen.
The task is huge: Finding a craft the size of a minivan in an area twice the size of the state of Connecticut and up to 2½ miles deep.
The search was stepped up Wednesday in an area where Canadian planes using sonar buoys detected what Carl Hartsfield of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution described as “banging noises.” Analysts have not yet figured out what was making those noises.
Among the growing collection of search vehicles on Wednesday were P-3 and C-130 aircraft patrolling the skies; five “surface assets,” including ships, on top of the water; and two unmanned, underwater robots called remote-operated vehicles (ROVs), said Capt. Jamie Frederick, response coordinator for the First Coast Guard District.
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A Canadian ROV reached the ocean floor on Thursday morning, the Coast Guard announced, and more ships, ROVs and other vehicles were arriving in the area.
The missing submersible, named Titan, carried a pilot and four expedition members toward the wreckage of the Titanic, which rests 12,500 feet below the surface on the ocean floor about 900 miles off Cape Cod.
Titan, piloted by Stockton Rush, the CEO of underwater expedition company OceanGate Expeditions, began its roughly two-hour descent at 8 a.m. Sunday. It last contacted its mother ship, the Canadian research ship Polar Prince, about an hour and 45 minutes into the dive. It was supposed to have resurfaced at 3 p.m., according to the U.S. Coast Guard.
The submersible could be bobbing on the surface, floating somewhere in the water column or resting on the ocean floor.
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Depending on where it is, the search-and-rescue mission could be the deepest ever attempted.
The deepest known rescue mission took place in 1973, when two British sailors trapped in a 6-foot submersible were towed out of a 1,575-foot abyss 150 miles off the coast of Ireland.
In 2022, the Navy hoisted the wreckage of an F-35 fighter jet from a depth of about 12,400 feet in the South China Sea, a recovery mission that took 37 days.
Additional sources: National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), OceanGate, Guinness World Records, Natural History Museum of London, Smithsonian Magazine, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution.
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