For once, the conversation wasn’t on Boris Johnson. Instead, the chatter at my local English pub over the past week turned to the Titan submersible story. A glance at the papers from across the world suggests my experience was not unique. But reports now suggest the “round-the-clock media coverage may have been futile from the start.” This is because those with the most information were fairly certain the submersible imploded just hours after its launch.
The world was told on Thursday that the five people on board the craft had “sadly been lost” due to a “catastrophic” failure. On the same day, it was revealed that the U.S. Navy detected “an anomaly consistent with an implosion or explosion” hours into the voyage. So why the need for five days of edge-of-seat coverage?
In England, shock jock presenter Piers Morgan led a number of segments, titled “TITANIC SUB DRAMA,” in which guests “broke down” while discussing the missing five, and friends of the individuals described their “hope” following reports of banging noises near the site.
And there was the constant highlighting of the time ticking down until oxygen supplies ran dry (despite officials believing it was likely this situation was false, since the submersible was, in their eyes, most likely already to be in pieces). Papers pointed to “the last hours” for a successful search to be conducted, noting that citizens were “holding on to hope” during the “last chance of survival,” or “their last hope.” Even The Wall Street Journal (WSJ), which later broke the news of the U.S. Navy’s Sunday findings (more on this shortly) declared on its Wednesday front page that “time grows short.”
People, it seems, were immersed in a story—one that wasn’t really a story at all.
A “senior” U.S. official told the WSJ—for a story published on Thursday—that the Navy
conducted an analysis of acoustic data and detected an anomaly consistent with an implosion or explosion in the general vicinity of where the Titan submersible was operating when communications were lost [on Sunday].
The noise of the implosion was detected by “a secret network of underwater sensors designed to track hostile submarines,” according to The New York Times.
This information was passed to the Coast Guard commander on site to help with the search. (The noise helped with “narrowing the scope of the search,” officials told the WSJ, yet officials maintained that the area of the hunt was “two times the size of Connecticut.”)
It hardly suffices to say that the finding was not made public at the time because, as the paper reports, officials “couldn’t say definitively” the sound came from the submersible. Even the families of those on board were not aware of this until Thursday, causing them, along with others around the world, to hold out hope.
It is not as though the information was kept completely confidential. Reports show that some in the deep sea community “also knew of the implosion indicator early on.” Among them was James Cameron, Titanic director and a keen oceanographer. He told journalists that following news of the disappearance,
I immediately got on the phone to some of my contacts in the deep submersible community. Within about an hour I had the following facts. They were on descent. They were at 3,500 metres (11,483ft), heading for the bottom at 3,800 metres.
Their comms were lost, and navigation was lost—and I said instantly, you can’t lose comms and navigation together without an extreme catastrophic event or high, highly energetic catastrophic event. And the first thing that popped to mind was an implosion.
Mr. Cameron described the tension built around the story as a
prolonged and nightmarish charade where people are running around talking about banging noises and talking about oxygen and all this other stuff. I knew that sub was sitting exactly underneath its last known depth and position. That’s exactly where they found it.
On Monday, he emailed colleagues to say that “we’ve lost some friends” and “it’s on the bottom in pieces right now.” That officials continued to play both with the public and, more importantly, relatives regardless was, he added, “a cruel, slow turn of the screw for four days as far as I’m concerned.”
Following the incident, a “safety investigation” has been launched. But given the number of questions surrounding the handling of information and the sensationalised coverage, some of which may be easily answered, others not, it doesn’t seem overly extreme to suggest an investigation into these elements, too.
