Range of machinery and methods to be employed in search for missing Titan submersible: Expert

for more in that missing submarine we are joined Now by Stefan Williams professor of marine robotics at the University of Sydney well thanks for joining us Prof firstly help us understand what is the latest technology in robotics that Rescuers are using right now while searching for the missing sub so they would use a combination of devices so they would have um Coast Guard vessels for example who who have come to the site to use acoustic systems to try and listen for any beacons they'll have aircraft um surveying to see if they can find the submersible if it has come up to the surface and then they may be starting to deploy remotely operated Vehicles which will be able to descend down to the wreck site to help assist with the search technology there it's still been very hard to find this vessel I guess with the ocean being so vast in the area remote what about the other factors that's making this such operation especially challenging foreign a big factor here of course is the depth so the Titanic's located in approximately 3 800 meters of water so that's 3.8 kilometers um under the seed surface um so they will have been uh preparing to descend the submersible to that depth to do some investigation around and and you know examine uh the wreck site my understanding is that they've lost contact with the submersible after it's about an hour and 45 into what was meant to be a two-hour descent um so it will be somewhere near it will have been somewhere near the sea floor at that point acoustic Communications are challenging at that kind of range and and of course you know Optical like light just will not penetrate in those sorts of depths so being able to see where the where the vessel might be is is a real challenge um you know what they would hope to do is to maintain acoustic Communications and tracking while the submersible was underway but it appears that they'd lost that contact with it Professor just when I was just looking at footage of this submersible it it's it's basically like being cramped inside a capsule uh you know not for claustrophobics but for the people inside the submersible right now who are fighting for their lives what is the condition like and what is it going to take to survive you know the remaining few hours left well that depends very much on what's happened in the interim so I think the best case scenario is that they've lost Communications but that otherwise the submersibles intact and and it's potentially coming to the surface there will be safety devices on board to either drop weight or inflate a bag to increase the buoyancy to bring the The Vessel back up to the surface if that's the case then it'll be a matter of trying to find it using either aerial surveillance or ships on the surface um another possibility is that they've had some sort of failure of some of the onboard systems and they've ended up potentially descending down to the sea floor in that case they would be relying on acoustic beacons and other devices that are independent of the vehicle's main power to try and locate um the submersible and to hopefully execute recovery um and you've just painted for us catastrophic potential is for a failure yeah right um you know you've just painted for us at the best case scenario uh just a little bit earlier but how optimistic are you of that actually happening I mean given the amount of time that it's been since they've heard from it and the fact that it it appears they don't have any communication submarine I'd be a little bit pessimistic you know I think there's a there's a chance that there has potentially been a catastrophic failure of the pressure vessel which is where the life support systems and where people would have been um housed um the submersible would have been subject to you know order 350 times atmospheric pressure so there's a huge amount of pressure pushing down on these pressure vessels once they're in the deep sea um and if there's been some sort of fault um then it is possible that the vessel would have been um essentially destroyed and and you know that would have had um serious consequences for people on board and uh Professor Steph Stefan when it comes to deep sea exploration or deep sea tourism in terms of Regulation I'm just wondering how rigorous is it and because of this latest incident what is its impact on the future of deep sea exploration so I think there are some regulations around operations in the high seas so outside of particular Maritime jurisdictions there are you know regulations of how you operate vessels and the sorts of things you can put in and recover from the sea um I'd say this deep sea tourism industry is relatively unregulated it's a relatively young industry it's something that's just coming onto the scene um you know you can look back a decade and people starting to talk about this as a possibility but it's only becoming sort of a commercial reality over the last few years it'll be interesting to see what impact this has and I I suspect a little bit the outcome of what happens over the next couple of days were really dictate the conversation we have going forward about how we manage these sorts of operations and the possibility of using this as a you know a tourism Venture and bringing people into these um you know extreme environments so we talk a lot about deep sea tourism and space tourism and people are increasingly wanting to kind of experience first and these extreme environments but there are significant risks associated with that well many thanks uh for explaining this All To Us Stefan Williams from the University of Sydney

Channel: CNA

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Id: CRf_v7F-dso

Length: 6min 2sec (362 seconds)

Published: Wed Jun 21 2023