A thunderous roar ripped through the Atlantic Ocean when the doomed Titan submersible imploded in 2023, killing all five people onboard.
The audio was captured from a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration device about 900 miles from where the sub dropped off the radar south of Newfoundland, US Coast Guard officials announced as they shared the roughly 20 second clip on Friday.
It reported that the ominous noise is the ‘suspected acoustic signature’ of the vessel’s implosion on June 18, 2023, which killed Shahzada Dawood, 48, and his son Suleman, 19; British businessman Hamish Harding, 58; former French navy diver Paul-Henri Nargeolet, 77; and co-founder of the sub owner’s company OceanGate Stockton Rushton, 61.
The eerie recording is the latest piece of evidence to emerge in the wake of the ill-fated expedition which sparked a huge investigation into determining the cause and the company’s processes as well as industry-wide safety reviews.
The group had set off on an expedition to view the remnants of the Titanic when the submersible suddenly lost contact with its support vessel, Polar Prince, after just about an hour and 45 minutes into the two-and-a-half hour descent.
One of the last messages from the crew to Polar Prince before the submersible imploded stated, ‘all good here,’ according to a visual re-creation presented at a Coast Guard hearing last year.
But the loss of contact sparked an international manhunt to track down the missing vessel which had plunged 12,400ft – more than twice as deep as the Grand Canyon – under the North Atlantic ocean.
Adding to the furor, the Coast Guard announced at the time that the sub had between 70 and 96 hours left before it ran out of oxygen, as a chilling banging noise supposedly coming from the vessel gave people hope that the five people on board might simply be trapped underwater.
Eventually, however, the wreckage of the ship was found on the ocean floor about 330 yards off the bow of the Titanic, with Coast Guard officials reporting that no one on board survived.
Following the tragedy, questions emerged about the safety of the submersible, which had been making voyages to the Titanic wreckage site going back to 2021.
It was later revealed that the vessel was being operated by a video game controller, and leaders in the field of deep-sea exploration had even warned OceanGate CEO Stockton Rush five years earlier that the company’s ‘experimental’ methods could end in ‘catastrophic’ disaster.
Others inside the company also expressed concerns, including David Lochridge, who worked as the Titan project’s director of marine operations.
He had demanded more rigorous safety checks on the sub – including ‘testing to prove its integrity’.
Lochridge also wanted the company to carry out a scan of Titan’s hull to ‘detect potential flaws’ rather than ‘relying on acoustic monitoring’ – which would only detect an issue ‘milliseconds before an implosion’.
But he was unceremoniously booted from the company in the aftermath, as Rush continually brushed off the concerns.
He even suggested at one point that questions about the Titan’s safety credentials was ‘personally insulting’ and he branded claims he was ‘going to kill someone’ as ‘baseless.’
Rush went as far as saying he was ‘tired of industry players who try to use a safety argument to stop innovation’ as he appeared resentful of the ‘obscenely safe’ regulations he viewed as an obstacle to development and innovation.
By September, the Coast Guard conducted public hearings to grill company executives on what may have gone wrong.
At the hearing, Karl Stanley, a submersible pilot and designer of the Roatan Institute of Deepsea Exploration, claimed Rush was more concerned with leaving ‘his mark on history’ than keeping his passengers safe.
‘He knew that eventually it was going to end like this, and he wasn’t going to be held accountable,’ Stanley testified.
‘But he was going to be the most famous of all his famous relatives.’
Stanley went on to say he had tried to flag safety concerns he noticed during a test drive in April 2019, including cracking noises and issues with drop weights. He emailed Rush, who dismissed the concerns.
‘I felt also, this exchange of emails strained our relationship from what it had been previously,’ he said. ‘I felt like I pushed things as far as I could without him telling me to shut up and never talk to him again.’
Stanley also said he viewed OceanGate’s characterization of paid passengers as ‘mission specialists’ to be an attempt to avoid accountability.
‘It’s clearly a dodge with trying to get around U.S. regulations with passengers,’ Stanley said.
Additionally, the company’s ‘entire business plan made zero sense,’ Stanley said.
‘There was nothing unexpected about this. This was expected by everyone who had access to a little bit of information,’ Stanley said.
‘And I think that if it wasn’t an accident, it then has to be some degree of crime. And if it’s a crime, I think to truly understand it, you need to understand the criminal’s motive.
‘The entire reason this whole operation started was Stockton had a desire to leave his mark on history.’
But Amber Bay, director of administration for the company that owned the doomed submersible, insisted that the company would not ‘conduct dives that would be risky just to meet a need’.
Still, she agreed that the company wanted to deliver for those who paid $250,000 and were encouraged to participate as ‘mission specialists.’
‘There definitely was an urgency to deliver on what we had offered and a dedication and perseverance towards that goal,’ she told a Coast Guard panel.
She later broke down in tears when discussing the tragedy, which was personal, because she knew the victims.
‘I had the privilege of knowing the explorers lives who were lost,’ Bay said through tears. ‘And there´s not a day that passes that I don´t think of them, their families and the loss.’
OceanGate, based in Washington state, suspended its operations after the implosion. The company has no full-time employees currently, but was represented by an attorney during the hearing.
The company said it has been fully co-operating with the Coast Guard and the National Transportation Safety Board investigations since they began.
