CLEVELAND — Experts in Cleveland weighed in on the desperate search for the Titan submersible Thursday, just before U.S. Coast Guard authorities announced they had found what they believed were parts of the vessel. The five people who were on board were presumed dead.
David VanZandt had been watching the search for the submersible closely. Decades of exploring the Lake Erie has taught him that no matter what kind of work you’re involved in, if it’s underwater the effort required “just goes up by orders of magnitude of how difficult it is to do it.”
“That’s a tremendous amount of pressure down there to expose anything to,” VanZandt said of the incident.
His company, Cleveland Underwater Explorers, has discovered up to 40 shipwrecks, often using robotic operated vehicles or ROV’s like the one that discovered what authorities believe are debris from the vessel.
“This is a small version of it. You know they come in industrial sizes,” he said pointing to a small ROV in his garage.
It’s similar, but he’ll be the first to tell you it’s far from the tragic situation that unfolded hundreds of miles offshore in the Atlantic.
“It takes a lot of expertise and a lot more hardware than we got to go down and do that,” he said. “You look at it from a logistical point of view and it’s just a herculean effort to do it.”
The ocean floor is a largely unknown area, even around more well-known sites like the Titanic
A.W. Omta would know. He’s an oceanographer with expertise in ocean modeling, biology and chemistry and works as a traveling assistant professor at Case Western Reserve University.
“There have been constant discoveries in recent years in the ocean,” Omta said. “And there’s still a lot more to be discovered because we have mapped so little of the ocean.”
In fact, he said scientist have only mapped 10% of the ocean floor. He’s also been watching the story of the submersible unfold, a search he compared to trying to find a needle in a haystack.
“We’re talking about almost 4,000 meters so it’s completely dark,” Omta said.
All factors that added to what was a desperate, dayslong search in the Atlantic that ended in tragedy.
