Actually, while materials will be badly deformed [bent and twisted] due to the energy of the implosion and the stresses put on them, the materials will only be very slightly compressed.
By comparison, since the 1912 sinking occurred slowly, there is probably 99% of its contents left intact. Albeit rusted and decayed over the century. The Titan contents are virtually gone in the flash.
I agree. I believe they will be able to recover quite a bit of this submersible.
While tragically sad it will be very interesting at the same time.
If I understand the crush/implosion scenario usually applied to submarine accidents, submarine hulls, being made of steel or titanium, begin to incrementally fail as they fall below crush depth. The sudden inrush of water raises air pressure (through volume reduction) and the crew either immediately passes out/dies, then the hull finishes crushing in as it disintegrates. The spectacular explosive implosion only occurs when a pressurized compartment is not deformed (thereby violating its pressure holding integrity) prior to total failure. Obviously, in a locked down compartmented submarine, you could have both failures happening depending on how the specific vessel’s structure failed.
The Titan was essentially a thick reinforced graphite tube with titanium end caps. IIRC, mention was made of finding the end caps in the debris field during yesterday’s USCG press conference. No information was shared on how damaged they were, if at all. By contrast, graphite fabrications under compression tend to fail suddenly and spectacularly; often turning into tangled shreds. So the “poof and you’re dead” analogy is probably not too wide of the mark.
Speculation now has the loss occurring about the time the communications were severed. That is, around an hour and 45 minutes into the descent. Previous reporting indicated that descent to the bottom took about 2 1/2 hours. So, if the accident occurred as speculated, the vessel was still thousands of feet above the wreck site and the debris would have dropped from that height down to the seafloor. An interesting post-mortem question will be whether the descent sled was deliberately dropped by the crew – indicating they knew they were in trouble and were attempting to resurface - or if it was simply blown/torn off the descending pressure vessel as it came apart.
Exactly