While I understand and appreciate the innate human need for exploration and discovery, I also understand that there are some things in this world which should be left alone, like, let’s say, an 111 year old shipwreck sitting over 3.7km deep in the North Atlantic ocean.
But, to each their own. The thrill of seeing the famous Titanic wreck, in person, is a privilege very few people can brag about, I get it.
If you have been following the OceanGate saga, you would know that after an extensive search and rescue mission, the United States Coast Guard found a debris field, confirming that the submersible carrying three tourists, one pilot and one crew member, had imploded due to a catastrophic failure.
Anyway, here’s what happens when a submarine implodes, explained by self-proclaimed nerd and Tiktok science communicator, Josh Cottle.
Walking around on the surface of the Earth, we’re accustomed to around one atmosphere of pressure while, down at the Titanic, the atmospheric pressure is around 400 times heavier.
Think of laying down with a 5 litre bottle of water on your chest, that weighs around 5 kgs. Now imagine 720 of those bottles on your chest with the weight of 3600 kgs, concentrated on a single square inch area of your chest. That was the pressure the submersible was under at those depths.
The average adult male is around 1.75 metres tall and weighs around 90 kg. Crunching the numbers, that’s about 1.93 square metres of surface area which would have just over 8000 tons of pressure pushing down on it.
With so much pressure pushing down on you, it is imperative that your submersible is able to keep its integrity at those depths but, as we now know with Titan, for some reason it was not able to withstand those forces.
The one positive aspect about catastrophic implosions is that they happen very fast, we’re talking less than a millisecond, possibly even a nanosecond.
It takes longer for messages to be sent to your brain to be processed with pain taking around 100 milliseconds to reach your brain. That is 99 milliseconds longer than it would take an implosion to happen.
It also takes 13 milliseconds for your brain to process visual imagery which means that even if you were looking directly at the implosion point, you would not know that it happened.
First off, there will not be any remains left that we can find due to the extreme heat anything inside the submarine would have been exposed to during the millisecond of the implosion.
When the hull of the submersible fails, the extreme pressure will compress that air so fast that it heats up to about the temperature of the sun, 5,500 degrees Celsius. This sequence of events happens in nanoseconds.
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