The Horizon Arctic ship entered the Canadian port of St. John's this Wednesday with several pieces of the Titan submersible found on the seabed 450 meters from the Titanic.
The remains – made of carbon fiber and titanium – were handed over to the authorities in charge of investigating the accident in which five people died on Sunday, June 18, while descending to the wreck of the most famous cruise ship in the world.
The Horizon Arctic sailed from St. John's on June 20 and arrived at the search site the next day. He had with him the ROV Odysseus, a remote-controlled robot that was sent from New York shortly after the submersible was reported missing and which was decisive in the outcome of the search.
“It has been a long mission for the men and women aboard the Horizon Arctic,” crew members said.
The ROV ended the rescue mission on Thursday, when in the morning it detected remains of the submersible on the ocean floor about 450 meters from the Titanic's bow.
The transportation safety boards of the United States and Canada, as well as the US Coast Guard and Canadian police are investigating the incident.
“Our team has successfully completed offshore operations, but remains on mission and will be in the process of demobilizing Horizon Arctic this morning,” said a spokesperson for Pelagic Research, the company that owns the deep-sea robot.
He noted that team members “have been working tirelessly for 10 days, through the physical and mental challenges of this operation, and are eager to finish the mission and return to their loved ones.”
The Horizon Arctic is owned by the same company as the Polar Prince, the ship that on June 18 towed the submersible out to sea and glided above it as it dived toward the Titanic.
Tom Maddox, founder and CEO of Underwater Forensic Investigations, told CBC News earlier this week that experts from the United States, Canada, France and England involved in accident investigation They could try to reconstruct the ship to know the precise moment in which it imploded and to be able to determine where the bodies of the victims would be found.
"Just like in a plane crash, they may try to reassemble the submarine to put the pieces together like a puzzle and determine where the point of failure was," he explained.
"In the case of a massive implosion it will not be an easy task because a large part of the ship would have disintegrated," he explained.
Likewise, former Canadian TSB investigator Marc-André Poisson said the American teams will likely lead the process alongside their Canadian colleagues, rather than conducting separate investigations.
He considered that the remains exposed on Wednesday will play an important role, but stressed that they will not tell the whole story.
"The Titan is only one component of the failure. (...) There could be multiple human factors involved that helped create the causes, conditions and contributing factors to the accident," Poisson stressed.
He added that in these cases researchers build a sequence of events from the facts, they will create hypotheses about what might have happened and then test them in the laboratory.
It's all part of an effort to "build a full understanding of how the system failed," he said.
Although the US Coast Guard said it would be difficult to recover the bodies, Dr. Ken LeDez, a hyperbaric medicine specialist in St. John's, said it could be possible.
“I think it would be reckless to rule out the possibility that they could recover recognizable bodies. I think it's possible. “Everything depends on the exact second [in which the Titan imploded], on how things happened,” said the deep-sea doctor.
All five people on board are believed to have died from a sudden implosion caused by "catastrophic loss of the pressure chamber."
Among the victims is Stockton Rush, CEO of OceanGate Expeditions, whose company built the Titan with an experimental design based on carbon fiber and titanium.
Rush acknowledged in several interviews that the materials were not those typically used to build deep-sea submersibles.
"I'd like to be remembered as an innovator. I've broken some rules to do this. I think I've broken them with logic and good engineering behind them. Carbon fiber and titanium, there's a rule that you don't do that. Well, I did it," he had said in 2021.
Rush was the ship's pilot on the voyage and died along with passengers Shahzada Dawood and his son Suleman Dawood, businessman Hamish Harding, and Titanic researcher Paul-Henri Nargeolet.
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