A grim animated video of the Titan submersible’s final moments has gone viral online, garnering millions of views in several days.
The six-minute explainer video was shared on YouTube by AiTelly, a channel that publishes 4K and 3D engineering animations.
In the video, the final moments of the Titan sub – which suddenly imploded due to intense pressure on June 18 – as it descended in the Atlantic Ocean to view the Titanic shipwreck.
Plunging to a depth of approximately 5,500 feet – less than half the depth of the Titanic, which sits at 12,600 feet – the vessel imploded as a result of immense pressure, killing all five men on board.
A narration in the short animation explains that ‘implosion’ is “a process of destruction by collapsing inwards on the object itself.” It continues: “Where explosion expands, implosion contracts.” At the Titanic’s depths, the video says there is “around 5600 pounds per square inch of pressure.” On the surface, humans experience 400 times less.
AiTelly’s video says that the Titan’s demise could have been the result of many things, including the surrounding water’s high hydrostatic pressure – this could have caused the OceanGate-operated submersible to implode “within a fraction of a millisecond.”
Accompanying this description was animated footage of the submersible being completely destroyed.
“Existing technology is based on steel, titanium and aluminium. These are what kept other submarines from being crushed. But the Titan has had an experimental design,” the video says, blaming the catastrophic implosion on OceanGate’s controversial use of carbon fiber.
As previously reported, the use of carbon fiber was not supported by David Lochridge, the former director of marine operations at OceanGate until 2018.
In an email sent shortly before being fired by late OceanGate CEO Stockton Rush, Lochridge wrote that he had numerous worries with the Titan sub after inspecting it.
Lochridge had been relentless in voicing his concerns about the carbon fiber pressure chamber, reinforcing the fact that the material was not something previously used in any other deep ocean sub and, as a result, it hadn’t been heavily tested.
As well as 61-year-old Stockton Rush, British billionaire Hamish Harding, 58, prominent Pakistani businessman Shahzada Dawood, 48, his son, Sulaiman Dawood, 19, and French Titanic expert Paul-Henri Nargeolet, 77, all perished on the ill-fated voyage.