Titan disaster forces rethinking of deep sea exploration
When five men died on June 18, 2023, in the implosion of the Titan submersible during a dive to the Titanic’s resting place, the knowledge of Paul-Henri Nargeolet was lost too. It was Nargeolet’s 38th dive to the sunken liner. Known as Titanic, he helped retrieve thousands of artifacts that have been displayed in museums and at events around the world. One year later, the company he worked for as director of underwater research is preparing a July expedition that will employ a pair of robots instead of people in submersibles looking for more treasures to bring up in the future.
Jessica Sanders, president of RMS Titanic which is organising the expedition, said, “there’s an art to artifact recovery and a human element that technology can never replace — and shouldn’t.” She said Nargeolet had embodied that kind of expertise. On the other hand, she said the results of the robotic expedition, “will speak for themselves.”
The plans of Nargeolet’s former employers show one of the more immediate effects of the Titan disaster: a prioritisation of robots for plying the icy depths in place of humans piloting submersibles. The robots are seen as safer.
In parallel, however, players in the submersible world are pushing for greater international regulation to bar another disaster. They want to close the gap that OceanGate, Titan’s maker, exploited in eschewing the voluntary safety certifications the industry uses to reduce the substantial risks for deep divers. The many fans of human-piloted submersibles want to make sure that Nargeolet’s legacy sets a path for a new generation of explorers. That could future human pilots who recover more of Titanic’s remains and paraphernalia — rivets, fine china, bottles of champagne — that lie scattered over roughly three square miles of the North Atlantic seabed.
On his last dive, Nargeolet hoped to glimpse one of his longtime recovery targets — the wireless telegraph that transmitted Titanic’s distress calls. Responding ships rescued hundreds of survivors, including women and children in lifeboats. In his autobiography, Nargeolet said Titanic wreckage around the famous telegraph is “likely to collapse in the short term,” making its rescue “all the more urgent.”
James Cameron, known for “Titanic,” his 1997 movie, also favours the telegraph’s retrieval. “To actually put that instrument on public display would be very moving for millions of museum-goers,” he said in an interview last year. In 1987, when Nargeolet made his first Titanic dive, underwater robots were rare. Then Cold War spin-offs caused their abilities and their numbers to soar. Robert D. Christ of the Marine Technology Society, an industry group, said that they now number in the thousands and that perhaps a hundred or so could descend to the Titanic’s depths, more than two miles down.
Large undersea robots bristle with lights, computers, video cameras, mapping systems, sensors and manipulator arms. Most have long tethers that link them to mother ships. Up top, the operators use joysticks and monitors to orchestrate the action below.