Lost with the Titanic: Will submarine passengers' remains ever be found?

Lost with the Titanic: Will submarine passengers' remains ever be found?
The shock of losing loved ones suddenly is one of the most troubling of tragedies. But add to that the mystery of where their bodies might lie at the bottom of the ocean.

For the families of the explorers who died in the Titan sub implosion, those are feelings likely to haunt them forever, as they have for generations of other families who lost relatives under similar circumstances: the sinking of the Titanic itself over a century ago.

No bodies have ever been found from the wreckage of the Titanic at a depth of 12,500 feet, where over 1,100 passengers are likely to have dissolved after years of salt-water erosion and undersea life foraging the site.
A similar scenario is likely for the Titan submersible. And then, there are the harsh realities of the violent implosion itself.

"It's not so much about deep sea as much as it is about the implosion. The force was compressing so rapidly that those bodies and souls had nowhere to go," said Aileen Maria Marty, an expert in infectious disease and disaster medicine at Florida International University's Herbert Wertheim College of Medicine.

Marty said that because of the way the sub imploded and likely crushed the bodies inside, "it’s very, very unlikely you’ll find any distinguishable body parts."

The conditions of the deep sea are so unknown and challenging and the implosion so catastrophic that the families of the five people who died could be long left with questions about what exactly happened to them.

On the ocean floor where the search crews found parts of The Titan 1,600 feet from the bow of the Titanic on Thursday, there is immense pressure, absolute darkness and extremely cold temperatures.

The Coast Guard said Thursday they did not know if they would be able to recover the five bodies.

The five passengers who were in the Titan submersible when it imploded on the mission were OceanGate’s CEO Stockton Rush, British billionaire explorer Hamish Harding, French maritime and Titanic expert Paul-Henry Nargeolet, one of the richest men in Pakistan Shahzada Dawood and his son Suleman Dawood.

They each paid $250,000 to take the voyage, which was promoted as an “extraordinary” expedition for travelers to become one of the few to “see the Titanic with your own eyes,” according to OceanGate’s archived itinerary of the mission. It was OceanGate’s third annual expedition to the Titanic, which struck an iceberg and sank in 1912, killing about 700 of the roughly 2,200 passengers and crew.