Mythbusters did a test at one point where they exposed a dead pig to a mere 9 atmospheres/300 feet of water pressure. The result is... not pretty. It's safe to say that no matter what happened to the Titan, there are no bodies to recover.
There shouldn't have been any of that for our adventurers here.
I've been perplexed by some of the descriptions of what would happen to the bodies and other things on board, so I'm looking forward to reading an expert analysis on the topic that I assume will show up eventually.
A lot of descriptions characterize an implosion as a misspelling of the word explosion, with things turning into a "mist", but this doesn't make any sense to me on its face, with the force being inward.
There are theories about vaporization due to compressive heating, but how this would work doesn't seem cut and dry to me, either, because of thermal conduction in such a short span of time before being immediately quenched by near-freezing water.
Some level of disintegration seems reasonable so there may not be bodies per se to be found, but it also seems plausible that there would be identifiable remains. We were able to locate parts (and verify the identities of) most of the passengers aboard United 93, for example. The pieces were small but they didn't "become physics" in some exotic way.
The fact that it happened in the deep ocean makes collection of any remains somewhere between impractical and impossible, no doubt.
I feel a little guilty indulging this morbid curiosity, and yet I am curious.
Instead they were slapped between two walls of water traveling at supersonic speeds. Still not pretty. Maybe some bone fragments could be found if they got lodged into the wreck of the sub.
What does a simple high-energy implosion do to a body? What about if you chase that with thousands of pounds of freezing-cold water from literally all directions? Does that make it more or less destructive? I don't know!
> What does a simple high-energy implosion do to a body?
Turn it into a paste at best. Get the fire piston effect calculated in and it's an incinerated paste.
> What about if you chase that with thousands of pounds of freezing-cold water from literally all directions? Does that make it more or less destructive?
insofar as everything isn't already destroyed, this would make it a order of magnitude more destructive. Water hammer will get everything up to absolutely ridiculous pressures and temperatures. At this point you're basically as close as you can get to atomizing a person.
I understand the forces are great but the inward direction seemed like it would matter. Remains to be seen how destructive it actually was but we can probably rule out mist or ash, at least, based on this news.
Regarding 9 atmospheres, I've not seen the Mythbusters episode, but I'm assuming that was an attempt to recreate the Byford Dolphin incident?