If you followed the Titan submersible story from a few months ago,
you know of the terrifying consequences of going too deep in a submarine.
Well, unfortunately, the Titan submersible is far from the worst incident of its kind.
As always, viewer discretion is advised.
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I think being afraid of the ocean is one of the fears that's completely justified.
If you're ever unlucky enough to find yourself in the middle of one,
not only do you have no way of ever making it to shore,
but there are things below you, somewhere in the depth,
that are just as horrifying as they are dangerous.
Thousands of feet below you, there's nothing but an inhospitable abyss,
and it would only be a matter of time before you could no longer tread water.
That alone is terrifying enough.
But incredibly, even if you think you know all of the scary things that the ocean has to offer,
I hate to break it to you, but there is one that you might not have heard of
that is the most terrifying of all.
Take a look at this picture.
This is an image of the Atlantic Ocean that was taken by NASA from orbit.
For those of you just listening, there is a bright blue swirl
that kind of looks like a storm you'd see in the clouds of Jupiter.
This is something known as an eddy.
An eddy is a circular current of water that looks like a whirlpool.
Typically, these are small, and you might notice them while you're paddling a canoe.
However, they are constantly forming in any body of water with a current.
In the Earth's oceans, these can become large enough
that they are assigned names similar to hurricanes.
The one in the picture is 150 kilometers (93.2 mi) across.
The reason it's so visible is that it happened to form in an area with lots of phytoplankton.
Now, generally, these aren't harmful, but not always.
In 2014, a diesel electric submarine was on a military mission
near the Paracel Islands in the South China Sea.
These islands are these beautiful, tropical-looking islands
with white sand and surrounded by turquoise waters.
The sea floor in that area though was kind of unique.
There are several trenches which can drop to as much as 10,000 feet.
And the variability in the depth can cause the currents in the area to flow a bit strangely.
As the sub was travelling along in its operational depth,
it passed over one of these trenches, when all of a sudden, it began to descend.
The captain immediately checked to make sure all systems were functioning properly, and they were.
This meant that something was actually pulling them down.
The captain then ordered the sub to ascend, but it was like the sub was falling off of a cliff
into the trench, or being pulled by something big.
As this continued, the sub began to get dangerously close to its maximum operational depth.
All subs have a maximum depth that they can safely go to due the immense pressure of the ocean.
If they go deeper than the material they're constructed with can withstand,
the pressure will overcome the sub and cause it to implode.
If you follow the Titan submersible story,
you probably have an idea of what happens at what is known as "crush depth".
As this continued, the crew could hear the hull bending and groaning, and eventually, pipes began to burst.
Water then poured in and threatened the engine.
All of this took place in just the span of a minute, so due to the urgency,
the captain was forced to seal the compartments with the men still inside.
To prevent the water from completely flooding them and sinking them even faster,
there was nothing else that they could do.
Then, two minutes went by, and they were still descending.
During it all, the captain was calling out evasive maneuvers
and blowing their ballast tanks to get them to the surface as fast as possible.
Then, right before they reached crush depth,
they began to ascend out of whatever was pulling them down and up to the surface.
They had somehow managed to escape by just the thinnest margins.
It's not clear if the captain's orders had saved them, or if it was just luck,
but either way, not a single man on board was lost.
It's thought that this incident was the result of some unusually strong eddies
which form in that area due to the irregular sea floor.
Later, these were measured to be 100 meters (328 ft) wide and thousands of feet tall,
and they can spin, or the current can travel, at 8 times that of the surrounding area,
almost like a slow-moving underwater tornado.
Apparently, though they're relatively slow-moving, they're still powerful enough
to drag a submarine to crush depth in just a few minutes.
Had they gone just a little bit deeper, they would've plummeted to the 10,000-foot trench below.
It's always been speculated that eddies form deeper in the water, as with any current,
but observing them is difficult because they're far enough away from the surface.
The men aboard that submarine were unlucky enough to observe one of them firsthand.
There's another incident which has striking similarities to the previous story
and is infamous in American military history,
because to this day, the cause is still not agreed upon.
On April 9th, 1963, a submarine known as the USS Thresher left port in Maine at 8 am.
The sub had just been overhauled and was scheduled to do some post-overhaul dive trials.
At 11 am, it met up with the ship it was going to be coordinating with on the surface
in an area of the ocean which is 8,500 feet (2,591 m) deep.
Later in the afternoon, the sub began its test dives and got to a depth of about 1,200 feet (366 m).
It planned to stay there overnight for a full test to be completed
and then begin again the following morning.
The following morning at 6: 30 am, the sub had spent 12 hours at depth and could begin a series of deeper tests
to further check the integrity of all of the overhauled systems.
To do this, it began making a series of small circles,
descending 100 feet at a time, and pausing at each increment.
Shortly into these tests, a message was sent by the sub.
It read, "Minor problem, have positive angle, attempting to blow."
This was in reference to blowing their ballast tanks in an effort to make a quick ascent.
After that, there was radio silence for a few minutes
until 9:17 am when a final message came in.
Through static, all that was received was "Test depth", and then there was nothing else.
It's thought that although not transmitted,
the message in full was likely meant to say, "Exceeding test depth".
From that point on, the sub would undergo a series of terrifying events.
First, pipes would begin to groan before bursting entirely.
This would then cause flooding and emit insanely powerful jets of water due to the pressure.
This flood would then short out electrical systems as men were blown to the side
by the pressure of the water in their attempts to stop the leaks.
With the increasing weight of the water, the ship would have become heavier and begin to sink faster.
All the while, the creaking and groaning would become louder and louder.
Then the cork on the inside of the hull would begin to crack and flake off.
Then, even the submarine itself would begin to bend and twist under the pressure.
Until finally, there was a complete implosion of the hull.
In an instant, or just 1/20 of a second,
the sub would have looked like an empty water bottle being crushed in someone's hand.
Afterward, it plummeted thousands of feet to the bottom of the ocean.
In the disaster, all 129 crew on board were lost.
The wreckage was found just a few days later, but due to the depth, has never been recovered.
And since the disaster, there have been studies and investigations to determine the exact cause,
but it seems as if the true cause isn't agreed upon.
The official position of the Navy is that there was a pipe boots burst in the engine room.
To give you an idea of how catastrophic this can be, when a pipe bursts at depth,
due to the immense pressure, the water can spray at unbelievable speeds.
For example, it was calculated that at 1,300 feet of depth,
a 2-to-5-inch pipe could flow at 1,800 miles (2,897 km) per hour.
That's fast enough to fill an Olympic-sized swimming pool in just 3 minutes.
The problem with this idea though is that other officials know that this would be catastrophic,
and it certainly wouldn't have been described as some minor issue by the captain.
For this reason, it's been debated if this was the true cause.
In any case, some additional issue also seemed to affect their ability to blow their ballasts.
Water then got on the reactor, causing it to automatically shut down.
Switching to battery systems takes a whole seven minutes, so in the meantime,
the subs slowly sank closer and closer to crush depth.
Before any other evasive maneuvers could be performed, the sub imploded.
This was detected by the ship above as a high-energy, low-frequency noise, typical of an implosion.
To this day, this is one of the worst submarine disasters in history.
And although being in a submarine has its own dangers, sometimes they pose a risk to other vessels.
On November 14th, 1990, six student officers and their teacher headed out
to a Trafalgar class nuclear submarine named the Trenchant.
These students were on the last part of a 24-week training exercise
to see who might make a good submarine commander.
The Perisher, as it's known, is one of the toughest command courses in the entire world, and it has to be.
The students who make it through might one day be responsible for a nuclear launch,
so they have to be the best of the best.
As the show goes on, the teacher, known as the course commander,
makes things gradually more stressful while slowly stepping back
to allow the students to take more control.
And these aren't young students straight out of naval school either,
they're experienced officers, ranging from senior lieutenants to junior lieutenant commanders,
all trying to make the leap to commander, and then one day maybe even captain.
In fact, when the course started, there were actually more than six students,
and it's pretty rare that even as many as six managed to get to the end of the course.
By November 16th, the first round of tests in the open ocean had finished,
and the group of six had become a group of four,
and the four who remained were about to face the hardest part of their evaluation.
They would have to do inshore maneuvers where the open ocean turns into tight and dangerous waters
around an area known as the Firth of Clyde in Scotland.
At 6 pm on November 21st, one of the students took over as captain for the exercise,
and his task was to lay dummy mines while a ship known as the Charybdis tried to stop him.
By 1:30 am, the student had released the last fake mine
and was now ready for the second part of his assessment.
Then he had the sub move up to periscope depth
so he could try to find the Charybdis and perform a simulated attack.
After ascending, while looking through the periscope, he could see the ship in the distance.
He could also see two fishing boats, but they were well out of the way,
so the student dropped the sub back into deeper water to complete the simulated attack.
Half an hour later, at 2 am, the exercise was declared over,
and the student got ready to pass command over to the next student
while the course commander and the captain had a conversation about how he'd done on the test.
His one final task was to make a 180 to get back to port,
but just as he did, they heard a sonar blip.
This meant that something was close by, and it seemed to be no more than 380 yards.
The problem was that the type of sonar the Trenchant had didn't give them an exact position;
just a range of where the object could be.
However, the crew assumed it was the Charybdi or one of the two fishing boats they'd seen,
and just piloted in a way to try to avoid them.
Less than 15 minutes later though,
the sonar controller let the captain know that something was still close by.
Then a couple of minutes after that, the signal had become louder.
They changed course slightly to get away from the signal, but apparently not soon enough.
Just before 2:19 am, they heard a banging on the front right-hand side of the hull.
Years earlier, Jamie Russell had become the captain of a fishing boat known as the Antares.
He'd started working as a fisherman straight out of high school,
and then when he was 23, he decided to take it seriously
and started working toward getting certified so he could run his own vessel.
A year later, he got the qualifications he needed, and then two years after that,
in 1980, he got his first small fishing craft.
In 1987, he was ready to take the next step, and he found a 57-foot (17.4-m) ship named Antares.
The Antares was an old ship, having been launched from the northeast coast of Scotland in 1965,
but it was well-maintained and sturdy.
Three years later, in November of 1990, Jamie decided to start a new type of fishing.
Until then, he'd mostly been bottom trawling.
Bottom trawling is when you use a cone-shaped net that catches fish at the bottom of the sea.
But that November, he switched to midwater or pelagic trawling.
For this, you still use a cone-shaped net, but a much bigger one
that spreads out higher up than a bottom trawler and drags along in the midwater.
Off the coast of Scotland, you're more likely to get mackerel, herring,
and blue whiting using a bigger, higher net,
and that can be much more lucrative than the tuna found at the bottom.
At 11 pm on November 18th, Jamie and the crew met on the Antares at the port.
After getting the boat ready, they set off around the Isle of Arran into the Firth of Clyde.
Just to the northeast of there is an area known as Bute Sound,
and in the middle, there's a deep, nutrient-rich trench that attracts a lot of fish.
At first, this was a pretty normal and eventful trip.
They weren't the only fishing boat out there,
so the ships had to coordinate their positions to avoid one another.
Then, each night, they would moor in a nearby port just up from the Bute Sound
and sell any fish they'd caught that day.
Three days later, on the 21st, at 5:30 pm,
the crew took the Antares back out to the southern end of the trench.
Two other vessels were already out there fishing,
so they kept in touch by radio and made sure to keep a safe distance.
Jamie let the other ships know that his plan was to go north of the trench
and then turn toward the Isle of Arran to see what they could pick up there.
He also let the other captains know that once they done that,
he was going to go below for some sleep
and that one of his crew would be taking over if they needed anything.
Afterward, the three ships each towed their nets in radio silence, focusing on their catches.
Sometime before 10:30 pm, they made the turn,
and Jamie headed downstairs while one of the crew took over.
At about the time Jamie was waking up again,
one of the other fishing vessels passed by the Antares.
At the time, it was going southeast, and the other ships saw the Antares raise its nets,
turn northwesterly, and then drop them again.
At that point, the third fishing boat came into view,
so the lookout who had been keeping an eye on the Antares shifted his focus to the other craft.
Then just 10 minutes later, the watchmen on the other two ships
told their captains that something wasn't right.
One radioed the other and asked if they could spot the Antares,
but neither could see the ship anywhere.
There wasn't any fog or bad weather, and the sea was calm that night, so they had a good clear view.
In response to the lookouts, the captains of the other ships just assumed
the Antares had headed far enough away that it would have been difficult to see in the distance.
However, the Antares hadn't sailed away.
At some time around 2 am, they felt a violent lurch as something snagged on their trawl line.
And from how powerful it was, they knew it was something big.
The captain immediately put the engine to full ahead and tried to raise the nets, but it wasn't working;
the Antares was being pulled down fast.
The crew ran for the life rafts, but they were difficult to release in all the chaos
because they were fastened down.
Then, before they had a chance to free them,
the Antares was pulled under the water and flipped upside down.
Water then rushed into the boat, and the two men who had still been inside the bridge
grabbed a hammer and smashed a window so they could get out, but it was too late.
The Antares was already on its way to the bottom, and it was dragging them with it.
As this was happening, the sonar commander on the Trenchant
had realized it was probably a trawl line,
but what he didn't realize was that there was still a boat attached to it.
He contacted the captain to let him know that they had snagged a line
and ordered them to stop all engines.
As they sat motionless, something scraped along the side of the submarine.
The commander took over and got them ready to head back up to periscope depth,
but they couldn't just go right up.
That might damage their sub by hitting whatever was around them or getting tangled further.
So instead, he told them to head forward slowly, just 5 knots,
and to turn the submarine a little, about 30 degrees.
Finally, they got to just 37 feet (11.3 m) below sea level,
but it was unclear if they'd cleared whatever they snagged on.
The captain decided to have his crew check for sonar noise at the surface,
but they couldn't detect anything, and for a moment, they thought the danger had passed.
Then another one of the crew who had been using the underwater phone
to listen out for anything out of the ordinary, reported a noise like a propeller winding up,
and what sounded like a strange disturbance at the surface.
The captain made a few more evasive maneuvers
just to make sure, and brought them up to periscope depth.
When they could finally see the surface, all they could see were the same two fishing boats.
They contacted the Charybdis to see if they had seen anything unusual, but they hadn't,
so they thought it might have been a discarded net that they just happened to run into.
Afterward, the captain brought the sub to the surface to inspect the hull to see if there was any damage,
and they found a wire attached to a length of chain stuck to a small dome that housed the sonar.
The chain was embedded into the plastic part of the dome,
and it seemed heavy enough that it was pulling the Trenchant over slightly.
They would just end up taking some bolt cutters and cutting the cable loose.
While this was going on, the captain of the Trenchant also called the two fishing vessels
to see if they'd seen anything unusual, but for whatever reason, neither of them responded.
So at 5 am, they decided that since no alarm had been raised,
it was probably okay to start the training exercise again.
They reported what happened to their operations room on shore,
picked a student officer to take over, and submerged for more exercises.
The operation room on the other hand was much more alarmed by this.
People in the area, especially fishermen, had been warning
since before the tragedy, that what they call submarine alley is a danger to ships.
In 1982, another ship called the Sheralga was dragged for 10 miles and capsized.
Those men were rescued, but they were lucky,
and the operation room was worried something like that had happened again
and that fellow sailors were out there needing help.
Operations then passed what had happened to the rescue service in the air,
and this began an investigation.
Eventually, word was passed to the secretary of the fishermen's association in the area,
and they began to ask fishermen if they knew a boat that might have lost their nets.
Eventually, one of the captains of one of the other ships that had been out that night was questioned,
and he realized that that might have been why the Antares had suddenly disappeared.
At first, this was a fate too difficult to contemplate.
Fishing is always a dangerous way to live, but to be dragged down by a submarine
that didn't even realize what it had done was a thought that was almost too terrifying.
The secretary then tried to call the Antares, but got no response.
Then he ordered a search of all the harbors, but they couldn't find the vessel.
Helicopters were scrambled, and it took them no time at all to find fish boxes
and traces of oil in the water close to where the Antares had last been seen.
The other ships who had been out that night also came out to help with the rescue,
along with thirty-one other fishing vessels from the area.
They began to search for any survivors in the sea and to use sonar to find the missing boat.
The Charybdis even sailed to join them and laid a buoy where the sonar had spotted something.
And tragically, it was the wreck of the Antares.
They would manage to salvage the ship, but obviously, all four crewmen had been killed.
The Trenchant had gotten caught in the Antares trawl line and dragged them under the ocean.
They didn't have time to get into the life rafts or do any of the other things
they'd been taught in their safety courses.
To this day, the Royal Navy still uses the Trench for the Perisher course,
but they claim they're more careful to avoid anyone who might be fishing out there.
If you made it this far, thank you so much for watching.
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