If the sub imploded shortly after reaching the titanic, how exactly did the people on board die? Was it an instant pressurized death? Do they drown or something?
Eg I'd imagine the poor souls on the Titanic next door are not crushed by the pressure, for the same reason.
Or with scuba diving, deep scuba is complicated and dangerous for many reasons, but the pressure compressing the body is not one of them.
Much better way to go then suffocate in darkness.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Byford_Dolphin
> Investigation by forensic pathologists determined that Hellevik, being exposed to the highest pressure gradient and in the process of moving to secure the inner door, was forced through the crescent-shaped opening measuring 60 centimetres (24 in) long created by the jammed interior trunk door. With the escaping air and pressure, it included bisection of his thoracoabdominal cavity, which resulted in fragmentation of his body, followed by expulsion of all of the internal organs of his chest and abdomen, except the trachea and a section of small intestine, and of the thoracic spine. These were projected some distance, one section being found 10 metres (30 ft) vertically above the exterior pressure door.
That's with a nine atmosphere pressure differential. The Titanic is at about 400 atmospheres.
- [1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5514183/#:~:tex...
> This resulted in the chamber being explosively decompressed from a pressure of nine atmospheres to the one atmosphere of the unsealed chamber system.
Whereas an analogous description of the submarine implosion would describe the opposite, i.e. "explosively compressed from a pressure of one atmosphere to 400 atmospheres."
Imploding or exploding, nine atmospheres is gonna suck. 400 atmospheres is... like standing under a nuclear bomb. The good news is it doesn't hurt, at all.
Someone else on the thread posted a video of a one atmosphere implosion (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zz95_VvTxZM). 400x the pressure here.
That said, you can get leaks. I participated on a research cruise with a French submersible, and there was talk of small leaks with the main hatch seal occurring during descent. The "fix" was to go deeper so the pressure would essentially seal the hatch shut.
Part of this is the use of carbon fibre, which is a very brittle material. In bike frame failures, for example, carbon fibre doesn't tend to rip a little or bend, it often fractures greatly or even shatters.
Add the enormous pressure difference, and this is why most people assume instant catastrophic failure.
But if the leak is noticed at say 20m they would have surfaced.
A leak with the amount of pressure at 1000m would cause a high speed jet like from a water cutter. That in turn would cause the material around the leak to be ground away.
This is really bad for the structural integrity and boom the whole thing implodes in a fraction of a second.
I was thinking more like a screw with resistance along the threads such that the pressure goes from 5800 psi to say 20 psi at the last thread or whatever. Then you might get a stable leak.
A screw is there to resist being pulled out. If water got to those screw threads as you posit, that'd basically be like reversing the forces to which that fastener was meant to resist. You go from "big chunk of material to hold in screw" to "little triangular threadforms trying to stay joined to the material around them in spite of 5800 psi trying to transit a pressure gradient insisting otherwise."
I'm not saying it's impossible, I'm just saying if I remotely thought it was possible to end up in that situation, I'd be going back to the drawing board to try to rule out that possibility. My brain just shows me visions of a screw turned into a bullet that barely gets slowed down going through a human body after threadforms crush like tortilla chips, a water cutter blasting through somebody into the opposite ablating a hole and causing a cascaded failure that then shortly thereafter becomes diesel thoomp.
If you'll excuse me, I'm abandoning this train of thought.
This would happen on the order of milliseconds.
Their blood would combust instantly.
They found cooked blood after that accident too.
This: https://www.dailyrecord.co.uk/news/uk-world-news/divers-bloo...
was 'only' at nine atmospheres the titanic is at four hundred!
400 bar is (from some quick searching) fairly mild for industrial hydraulic systems, and hydraulic fluid doesn’t get especially hot while in use.
On the other hand, a leak in a pressurized hydraulic system is extremely dangerous if you’re around it due to the extreme velocity of ejected fluid.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zz95_VvTxZM
Video contents: An experiment where the vacuum safety valves were removed from an oil tanker railroad car, and a vacuum was placed inside the car, resulting in it crumpling in an implosion. There is no gore or other specific disturbing content
"almost 4000 meters of water" is "almost 400 atmospheres". About 2.7 tons per square inch. I find that that absolutely unimaginable. - I can't find any equivalence that my brain can make sense of.
For every ten meters of descent, pressure increases by 1 atmosphere. At 4000 meters, that's 400 atm, or ~40 Mega Pascals, which is significantly higher than the pressure caused by the bomb that leveled a building in Oklahoma.
The hull shattered catastrophically, and the pressure wave liquified the occupants instantly. It's horrifying, but at least it was painless.
Probably the fastest and least painful way to die, short of sitting on a 2000 lb bomb or the like when it goes off.
Instantly too, as carbon fibre is brittle, this would not have been a progressive process.
Milliseconds, at most.
Not that anyone had to die.
I'll watch the drone footage of the deep ocean, thanks.
If it was structurally compromised, the implosion would be so fast, a combustion event a la what happens in diesel engines would have occurred.
There would be no bodies. There would only be shreds of pressure hull.
The titanium hemispheres may have maintained their shape. There is a slight chance it may have been a pinhole leak, and someone had a second to go "Uh..." before the rest of the structure started giving way.
It is clear that even these "strain gauges and microphones" to detect compromise of the structure were useless, or that the issure ultimately rested on the window in the front.
The main point to keep in mind is that short of finding the two hemispheres in the next day or so, we'll likely not know the full details with regard to the course of events of the unmaking of the vehicle.
The Sea has claimed them, and she is wont to give up her dead. Hubris, met by the cold hard edge of reality, has proven to be an insufficient aegis once again.
May they rest in peace.
Implying the middle carbon fiber imploded.
Bodies are mostly water, which is not compressible. So not really. But all the voids would have filled very quickly: the sinuses, ears, trachea, and lungs would have collapsed instantly. The bodies would also have been "pasted" against the opposite bulkhead to the failure, as unlike water the air around them would have been very compressible indeed.