World News

22075 readers

148 users here now

Breaking news from around the world.

News that is American but has an international facet may also be posted here.

Guidelines for submissions:

Where possible, post the original source of information.
- If there is a paywall, you can use alternative sources or provide an archive.today, 12ft.io, etc. link in the body.
Do not editorialize titles. Preserve the original title when possible; edits for clarity are fine.
Do not post ragebait or shock stories. These will be removed.
Do not post tabloid or blogspam stories. These will be removed.
Social media should be a source of last resort.

These guidelines will be enforced on a know-it-when-I-see-it basis.

For US News, see the US News community.

This community's icon was made by Aaron Schneider, under the CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0 license.

founded 2 years ago

MODERATORS

[email protected]

126

Titan sub: crew have died after catastrophic loss of pressure chamber, US Coast Guard confirms (www.theguardian.com)

submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

137 comments fedilink hide all child comments

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Well the fact that they are saying it was a catastrophic implosion leads to the thought that it was crushed in a very short amount of time maybe even a few seconds so I doubt they had time to drown.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

It's not a few seconds, it's a very small fraction of a second. The Thresher imploded in 1/20th of a second at 730 meters. We don't know for sure how far down Titan was when it imploded, but based on the time they lost signal, I'm guessing around 3500 meters, so we're talking about 4-5 times as much force. Plus the hull was made of extremely brittle carbon fiber, so it wouldn't buckle at all, it would just collapse all at once. It's hard to overstate how much force we're talking about; at that depth, it's about equivalent to building the Empire State building out of lead and sitting it on top of the ship with no other supports.

It's not just that they didn't have time to drown; it would have imploded so quickly that they would have been dead before their brains even had time to process that something was happening.