Five people in a small submersible were living a very special adventure: going down to the bottom of the Atlantic to see directly the remains of the Titanic 111 years after it sank. The four tourists and the operator of the device capable of going down to depths of up to 4,000 meters have disappeared during the dive.
Despite not having been the worst shipwreck, since some twenty shipwrecks have had more victims, the RMS Titanic remains the most famous in history. A phenomenon beyond the maritime, the first film about the disaster of an ocean liner on her maiden voyage on April 15, 1912, was released in theaters four weeks after she sank to the bottom of the ocean. . It was with a 35-minute silent medium-length film starring Dorothy Gibson, a surviving actress of the disaster in which 1,514 people of the 2,224 on board died: 68% of the crew and passengers lost their lives.
Several more films, such as the famous James Cameron version that won 11 Oscars, along with books, exhibitions, museums, documentaries and an infinite amount of memorabilia, have made the wreck of this 269-meter ship legendary and even a place of pilgrimage, as is the case of some tourist trips that sail through the area of the sinking. The place is about 2,000 kilometers from New York and 1,100 kilometers from Halifax, in Nova Scotia, Canada. These ships simply make a symbolic navigation, recalling the history of the ship that sailed for the White Star Line and even stop in the area, as was the case with the Fred Olsen ship Balmoral, which in 2012, the centenary year, designed a voyage specific for fans of the history of the Titanic, recreating part of the trip and stopping its journey at the place of the crash against the iceberg that opened a waterway to the ship considered unsinkable.
The purely tourist trips stay on the surface, although there are others, expeditions, that go much further and propose to those who sign up, to be witnesses in first person, of the situation of some remains that rest at 3,700 meters deep, where the pressure is enormous and that it was not discovered until 1985 when the oceanographers Robert Ballard and Jean-Louis Michel were the first to see the ship with their own eyes when it had been lying in place for 73 years.
Ocean Gate, a company specialized in organizing scientific and professional expeditions for hydrographic inspections, work for gas and oil companies or submarine cable installations, has also opened up to select and special tourism: those who seek the last frontier and want go where few people have. This desire has been seen as a good source of financing and benefits for the company and in the case of the Titanic, in 2021 and 2022 two expeditions were carried out with the objective of continuing to document the state of the ship, taking new photos, seeing the evolution of the helmet and charge 250,000 euros to those who want to participate, turning them into 'qualified explorers'. The one in 2023 will be remembered for this incident.
The voyage schedule states that those who join the 10-day adventure, eight of which are spent in the ocean, have the opportunity to join the expedition as crew members and the fee paid covers training and funds the global mission. The most desired part of the trip is the immersion in the Titan, a Cyclops-class manned submersible designed to carry five people whose greatest virtue, in addition to being able to go down to four kilometers deep, is having a constant monitoring system that permanently evaluates the state of the hull, subjected to enormous pressures.
It seems that this modern system to go down to the depths of the North Atlantic has not worked as well as expected and constant monitoring has been lost, as have the submersible and its occupants, increasing the myth of the Titanic 111 years later.
The work for the complicated search for this small group of people has already begun and from the port of San Juan de Newfoundland, in Canada, three rescue and rescue ships have already set sail: the Horizon
Arctic, Polar Prince and Kopit Hobson 1752. In the information for the automatic identification system, these ships indicate that they are destined for the Titanic Wreck Site: the site of the Titanic wreck. A place that is news again.
