Anyone who keeps up with the news likely knows about the implosion of OceanGate's Titan submersible
by now, but what actually happened to the people inside?
The details are pretty gruesome.
Five people died in the vessel's destruction: OceanGate CEO Stockton Rush, owner of Action
Aviation Hamish Harding, Pakistani businessman Shahzada Dawood , his son Sulemon Dawood,
and French explorer Paul-Henri Nargeolet.
The implosion occurred sometime after the Titan descended into the Atlantic Ocean to
visit the wreckage of the Titanic on Sunday, June 18, 2023.
Coast Guard Rear Admiral John Mauger explained that an unmanned vehicle found debris from
the Titan — including its tail end — about 1,600 feet from the bow of the Titanic.
The pieces of the Titan sit about 12,500 feet below the surface.
That's deeper than nine Empire State Buildings stacked on top of each other.
At that depth, water pressure crushes the entire human body except for the bones and
crumples vessels with any crack or defect.
If a submersible implodes into a human body, there's not much chance of finding any remains,
ecologist Nicolai Roterman explained to NBC News.
The deceased would have died instantly and "known nothing" as their bodies were subjected
to pressure equal to the weight of the Eiffel Tower.
"The sea pressure is 380 times the pressure on land."
Anyone who has ever dove to the bottom of a pool or taken part in scuba diving can attest
to feeling the pressure underwater.
Even at shallow depths, you can feel the difference in your lungs, your head, your ears, and elsewhere.
Dive Deep Scuba explains that the limit for recreational, non-beginner scuba diving without
a special deep-diving suit is about 130 feet, about one hundredth of the depth of the Titan.
Go lower you'll suffer decompression sickness when returning to the surface, also known
as "the bends."
This condition results in headaches, dizziness, numbness, joint pain, an inability to concentrate,
and more.
According to Scientific American, for every 33 feet of depth underwater, the pressure
on an object increases by 15 pounds per square inch, or psi.
Sunlight cuts out at 656 feet deep, at around 298 psi.
Rottweiler bites equal 328 psi, Ruffle Snuffle notes, while crocodile bites measure up to
3,700 psi.
A great white shark can bite up to 4,000 psi.
Where the Titanic rests underwater, pressure pushes in at an unbearable 5,500 to 6,000 psi.
All of that pressure was pushing on the Titan when it imploded, as well as each of the people
inside, on every single square inch of their bodies all at once.
NBC News calls that equivalent to up to 10,000 tons pressing against them.
A 2009 "Mythbusters" episode demonstrated what happens to a human body subjected to
deep-sea diving pressure high enough to cause an implosion.
The experiment saw "a human-shaped dummy made of pig parts with bones, muscle, fat, skin
and midsection of guts" stuffed into a deep-sea diving suit.
What results is a popping, spurting mass of red flooding the diving helmet as the dummy's
suit is depressurized.
"That is absolutely confirmed, no doubt about it."
Needless to say, no one could survive such pressure.
And that dummy was only 300 feet deep.
The Titan was at more than 40 times that depth.
Blair Thornton, a professor of marine autonomy at the University of Southhampton, told NBC
News that it wouldn't take some large, visible crack to make a submersible implode at the
depths of the Titanic.
It would only take minuscule or even microscopic defects.
"The air inside would compress down to a point, and the forces of the water rushing in and
the collapse would be enormous."
He added that it would be as if the crew winked away in "the blink of an eyelid."
That means those on board likely didn't even know what happened, nor did they suffer.
Such statements, however, are unlikely to provide comfort to the victims' loved ones.