Tourist submarine exploring Titanic wreckage disappears in Atlantic Ocean: Coast Guard

The Boston Coast Guard said a search began on Monday for the small sub, which takes tourists to view the iconic wreckage that sits about 12,500 feet at the bottom of the ocean, roughly 600kms off the coast of Newfoundland, Canada.

OceanGate Expeditions, a private tour firm which runs US$250,000-a-seat expeditions to the site, confirmed that the missing submarine belonged to them, adding that crew members were on board the vessel.

“Our entire focus is on the crew members in the submersible and their families,” the company said in a statement.

“We are exploring and mobilising all options to bring the crew back safely.”

It said government agencies and deep sea firms were helping the operation.

The family of world explorer Hamish Harding revealed on Facebook that he was among the five travelling in the missing submarine.

Mr Harding, a British businessman who previously paid for a space ride aboard The Blue Origin rocket last year, shared a photo of himself on Sunday signing a banner for OceanGate’s latest voyage to the shipwreck.

The traveller boasted about finally being able to get to see the Titanic, noting that because of the poor weather persisting in Newfoundland, Monday morning’s mission would be the only one of 2023.

“We started steaming from St. Johns, Newfoundland, Canada yesterday and are planning to start dive operations around 4am tomorrow morning. Until then we have a lot of preparations and briefings to do,” Mr Harding wrote before the dive.

His stepson, Brian Szasz, shared Mr Harding’s post, writing: “Thoughts and prayers for my stepfather Hamish Harding as his Submarine has gone missing exploring Titanic. Search and rescue mission is underway.”

The missing craft is believed to be OceanGate’s Titan submersible, a truck-sized sub that holds five people and usually dives with a four-day supply of oxygen, the BBC reports.

It is not known when contact with the craft was lost.

The Boston Coast Guard did not immediately respond to The Post’s request for additional information.

The wreck of the disaster has remained a popular tourist destination, with passengers taking to the depth to see the haunting site where more than 1,500 passengers died after the “unsinkable” ship struck an iceberg and sank while sailing from Southampton, England, to New York in April 1912.

The wreck was discovered in the Atlantic in 1985 about 370 miles off the Canadian coast, with the ship lying in two parts after it split in half during its sinking.

The catastrophe was immortalised in James Cameron’s 1997 film “Titanic,” starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet. The film shattered box office records at the time, earning $2.25 billion.

OceanGate Expeditions is one of several companies that offer submarine rides to the site.

It touts the eight-day trip as a “chance to step outside of everyday life and discover something truly extraordinary.”

The dives themselves can last up to 10 hours each, with the company boasting about recent trips to the Titanic on social media. The company noted that because of its location in the middle of the Atlantic, they rely on Elon Musk’s Starlink satellites for its communications at sea.

OcenGate posted on Twitter that one expedition to the Titanic was ongoing, with two more planned for June 2024.

OceanGate Expeditions chief executive Stockton Rush told CBS late last year that his company sees no shortage of “Titaniacs,” people obsessed with the ship who “would mortgage their homes or wouldn’t even blink at the cost of this trip.” Rush boasted that his five-person sub was one of the few capable of visiting the wreckage.

Last month, Atlantic Productions and deep-sea mapping company Magellan Ltd. released a series of more than 700,000 scans of the wreckage, displaying stunning 3D reconstructions of the doomed cruise liner.

The images were taken by a team using remote-controlled submersibles to survey the ship, a project that took more than 200 hours to complete.

– With The NY Post