Source: Anadolu Agency / Getty
A five-person crew on a submersible named Titan, owned by OceanGate Expeditions, submerged on a dive to the Titanic wreckage site Sunday morning, and the crew of the Polar Prince research ship lost contact with the sub about an hour and 45 minutes later, the U.S. Coast Guard said Monday afternoon.
The sub was lost in an area about 900 miles east of Cape Cod, in the North Atlantic, in water with a depth of about 13,000 feet. It had less than 40 hours of breathable air left as of Tuesday evening.
By Tuesday, crews from the U.S. Coast Guard, Canadian coast guard, U.S. Navy and Air National Guard had collectively searched about 7,600 square miles since the sub vanished two days prior, according to Frederick. That combined search area is larger than the state of Connecticut, the captain noted.
A Coast Guard official said earlier that the people aboard included an operator and four mission specialists — a term the company uses for its passengers. CBS News confirmed that Hamish Harding, a British billionaire and adventure traveler, is among the group of those missing.
According to CNN, citing an internal U.S. government memo, the crews detected banging noises in 30-minute intervals over their sonars emanating from inside the North Atlantic Ocean Tuesday after the submarine disappeared two days earlier while on a tourist exploration to see the Titanic wreckage.
