let's bring into the conversation right now Dr salmercagliano with Campbell University who's
been guiding us through this story uh throughout the course of the week and he joins me now uh
thanks so much for being with us yet again I know we talked to you earlier this afternoon we wanted
to get you though here in prime time uh because uh and Sal there's this story that's breaking
right now in the Wall Street Journal I want to put up the headline here and this is what they
are reporting a top secret U.S Navy detection system designed to spot enemy submarines first
heard the Titans submersible implosion days ago so uh from your expertise and experience
were they involved at all with the search effort and if not why not
well this is the uh this is the solstice array and this was used to detect uh Soviet during
the Cold War day submarines coming in it's an array of listening devices on the ocean floor
and what makes the Celsius array really unique is that it can hear at those really deep levels
and more importantly because there's multiple arrays that can actually triangulate in so they
should have been able to determine a approximate position of where that explosion took place it
really depends on where the arrays are located in in this area here is a tough one to get into
because you're coming up against the continental shelf but again they would not exactly know what
that explosion was what they would have detected is a noise and again not exactly clear if it's an
implosion noise or just a noise in general I think going back through they were able to see through
the data and figure out okay we this is a normal anomalous noise now we need to go investigate it
yeah because according to the Wall Street Journal report it says shortly after The submersible's
Disappearance Sunday the U.S system detected what it suspected was the sound of an implosion near
the debris site discovered Thursday I want to get to the news uh when we woke up this morning that
some debris had been found when you heard that news what went through your mind uh to me because
we heard from Coast Guard officials they founded about 1600 feet from the Titanic wreck site itself
that's about five football fields in length that's pretty close if you want to kind of parse through
uh you know how close that was or how not close that was so to me I was kind of thinking you know
what took them so long if it was that close to the Titanic wreck site of finding some debris at all
sure I mean so to put this in the context uh 1600 feet twice the length of Titanic the
reason it took him this long is they had to do this search with an ROV and basically what you
had was the visual imagery from the ROV which is only depending on the visibility down there
maybe a few meters so again imagine you know searching through several football fields and
the only thing you can look at is maybe a yard in front of you and a yard to each side and you
just have to go up and down and cover that entire area and probably once they got those RVs on site
they went down to Titanic itself because they knew that's where Titan was going and probably worked
out a search grid to cover the area around Titanic working their way out and that's where they found
it the bow section where they were found it's it's free of debris most of the debris came after the
vessel so that was a be a pretty flat clear area and so any objects that were on the surface of the
ocean would be found you know pretty clearly once they see it and this debris also wouldn't have a
lot of that growth and and marine life and sand on it that you see right there is also I was kind
of curious as well we know that about an hour and 45 minutes into the mission the trip itself that's
when contact was lost and I know it's kind of hard to predict but it seems like the prevailing wisdom
today right now is that that is possibly the moment that the entire vessel imploded are you
seeing that do you agree with that is there any evidence would there be any evidence to actually
determine that yeah hour and 45 minutes is about two to two and a half hours down to the bottom and
they've lost communication before we've seen that repeatedly from stories that they've lost this the
survey of the bottom where the Rex is is going to tell us that if the debris field is close together
that means that the the implosion happened closer to the bottom if the debris is further
apart in other words it happened at a height above Titanic and the Gulf Stream came into effect and
drift came in then that debris pattern would be scattered over a much larger area so they should
be able to ascertain based on the location of of the debris when it happened uh with the implosion
on board yeah and I think you know just kind of talking about you know what these five on board
went through uh during this uh you know everyone was trying to kind of put themselves in their
shoes throughout the course of this story and then we got word that this Theory might have been out
there that and you and I talked about it just last night that the structural Integrity of the vessel
itself could have caused an implosion because of the immense pressure put on the sub itself
and people are essentially saying that you know it was pulverized and people are asking well whether
or not these bodies can be recovered but that's not operative is it because of the circumstances
yeah I mean there's very low probability of recovering a body I mean just that
pressure depth you're talking about would have crushed everything at that level
I think what we're going to see happen here next is part of the recovery operation will be to
bring parts of the debris up in particularly what they're going to want to look for is that tubular
shape that connected the two end caps where the passengers rode on board that's really the area
that's going to have the biggest question that is that fiber alloy that's put together they'll
want to be able to examine that and see what exactly potentially happened this goes into
the jurisdiction of who's going to be doing an investigation in this this hasn't been ironed
out yet my view is it's probably going to be a joint Coast Guard NTSB and Canadian investigation
based on the ownership of the company and the Canadian vessels involved in here but they're
going to want to bring it up they're probably not going to be able to bring up everything
here but they'll bring up as much as they can in order to retrace what exactly happened yeah
and that goes to where the investigation goes from here obviously you still have so many
questions like so many others what will you be looking for though in the investigation itself
you know the things I'm going to be looking for here is not just so much what happened down
at the site but what was Ocean Gate doing with this submersible in between Dives what did they
do when they came back in from a dive are they investigating it are they doing checks and and
making sure that the hull Integrity is in place because that's going to show whether or not they
were doing their due diligence to ensure that this craft was safe throughout again we talked about
this earlier and the reason you know they decided to do away with a classification society and what
a classification society would have required is periodic checks inspections to ensure that this
submersible was maintaining its Integrity after not just an initial dive but every dive it went on
yeah because I think that's another question uh you know the communications internally with
Folks at Ocean Gate both before during after and throughout the course of this entire week
I think that would kind of give a huge huge vantage point of viewpoint into what they
were thinking and how they were operating and acting throughout the course of this search
yeah because I do think there are decisions made in the construction of this submersible again you
know a lot of things we talked about redundant communication systems emergency Beacon of some
kind that eats up power and eats up weight and the only way you can lose weight on this submersible
is by booting somebody off of it and so decisions were made decisions were made about what to put on
the submersible what not to put on the submersible and the larger question now is the impact this
has on the submersible industry particularly the commercial side okay um summer cagliano
we really do appreciate you kind of guiding us through this story throughout the course of the
week your expertise is really you know unmatched and we are very very appreciative thanks so much
but thanks for having me okay uh right now though we do want to put up the statement here from Ocean
Gate we read this out right when it came out earlier today and I'm going to read it in full
here they say we now believe that our CEO Stockton Rush shazada de wood and his son Suleiman dewood
Hamish Harding and Paul Henry nargilei have sadly been lost these men were true explorers who shared
a distinct Spirit of adventure and a deep passion for exploring and protecting the world's oceans
our hearts are with these five souls and every member of their families during this tragic time
we grieve the loss of life and joy they brought to everyone they knew this is an extremely sad time
for our dedicated employees who are exhausted and grieving deeply over this loss the entire Ocean
Gate family is deeply grateful for the countless men and women from multiple organizations of the
International Community who expedited wide-ranging resources and have worked so very hard on this
mission we appreciate their commitment to finding these five explorers and their days and nights of
tireless work in support of our crew and their families this is a very sad time for the entire
Explorer community and for each of the family members of those lost at sea we respectfully
ask that the privacy of these families be respected during this most painful time