The search for the missing Titanic expedition sub is near the critical 96-hour mark — when breathable air inside was expected to run out. Officials said the sub, which was taking five people to the Titanic, had enough oxygen through early Thursday.
Broadcasters around the world started newscasts at the critical hour with news of the submersible. The Saudi-owned satellite channel Al Arabiya showed a clock on air counting down to their estimate of when the air could potentially run out.
Captain Jamie Frederick of the First Coast Guard District said authorities were still holding out hope of savingThe area of the North Atlantic where the Titan vanished Sunday is also prone to fog and stormy conditions, making it an extremely challenging environment to conduct a search-and-rescue mission, said Donald Murphy, an oceanographer who served as chief scientist of the Coast Guard’s International Ice Patrol.
The Titan weighs 20,000 pounds . The U.S. Navy’s Flyaway Deep Ocean Salvage System is designed to lift up to 60,000 pounds , the Navy said on its website. “Imagine a metal tube a few meters long with a sheet of metal for a floor. You can’t stand. You can’t kneel. Everyone is sitting close to or on top of each other,” said Arthur Loibl, a retired businessman and adventurer from Germany. “You can’t be claustrophobic.”
OceanGate has been criticized for the use of a simple commercially available video game controller to steer the Titan. But the company has said that many of the vessel’s parts are off-the-shelf because they have proved to be dependable. Jeff Karson, a professor emeritus of earth and environmental sciences at Syracuse University, said the temperature is just above freezing, and the vessel is too deep for human divers to get to it. The best chance to reach the submersible could be to use a remotely operated robot on a fiber optic cable, he said.
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