What Deep Sea Implosions Do To A Body

Anyone who keeps up with the news likely knows about the implosion of OceanGate's Titan submersible by now, but what actually happened to the people inside? The details are pretty gruesome. Five people died in the vessel's destruction: OceanGate CEO Stockton Rush, owner of Action Aviation Hamish Harding, Pakistani businessman Shahzada Dawood , his son Sulemon Dawood, and French explorer Paul-Henri Nargeolet. The implosion occurred sometime after the Titan

descended into the Atlantic Ocean to visit the wreckage of the Titanic on Sunday, June 18, 2023. Coast Guard Rear Admiral John Mauger explained that an unmanned vehicle found debris from the Titan including its tail end about 1,600 feet from the bow of the Titanic. The pieces of the Titan sit about 12,500 feet below the surface. That's deeper than nine Empire State Buildings stacked on top of

each other. At that depth, water pressure crushes the entire human body except for the bones and crumples vessels with any crack or defect. If a submersible implodes into a human body, there's not much chance of finding any remains, ecologist Nicolai Roterman explained to NBC News. The deceased would have died instantly and "known nothing" as their bodies were subjected to pressure equal to the weight of the

Eiffel Tower. "The sea pressure is 380 times the pressure on land." Anyone who has ever dove to the bottom of a pool or taken part in scuba diving can attest to feeling the pressure underwater. Even at shallow depths, you can feel the difference in your lungs, your head, your ears, and elsewhere. Dive Deep Scuba explains that the limit for recreational, non-beginner scuba diving without a special

deep-diving suit is about 130 feet, about one hundredth of the depth of the Titan. Go lower you'll suffer decompression sickness when returning to the surface, also known as "the bends." This condition results in headaches, dizziness, numbness, joint pain, an inability to concentrate, and more. According to Scientific American, for every 33 feet of depth underwater, the pressure on an object increases by 15 pounds per square inch,

each of the people inside, on every single square inch of their bodies all at once. NBC News calls that equivalent to up to 10,000 tons pressing against them. A 2009 "Mythbusters" episode demonstrated what happens to a human body subjected to deep-sea diving pressure high enough to cause an implosion. The experiment saw "a human-shaped dummy made of pig parts with bones, muscle, fat, skin and midsection of

guts" stuffed into a deep-sea diving suit. What results is a popping, spurting mass of red flooding the diving helmet as the dummy's suit is depressurized. "That is absolutely confirmed, no doubt about it." Needless to say, no one could survive such pressure. And that dummy was only 300 feet deep. The Titan was at more than 40 times that depth. Blair Thornton, a professor of marine autonomy at

the University of Southhampton, told NBC News that it wouldn't take some large, visible crack to make a submersible implode at the depths of the Titanic. It would only take minuscule or even microscopic defects. "The air inside would compress down to a point, and the forces of the water rushing in and the collapse would be enormous." He added that it would be as if the crew winked

away in "the blink of an eyelid." That means those on board likely didn't even know what happened, nor did they suffer. Such statements, however, are unlikely to provide comfort to the victims' loved ones.