The apparent success of the leaseback arrangement might explain how Rush was able to attract what was OceanGate’s largest ever investment in 2020, at a time when the company was working on the expensive task of replacing the Titan’s first hull that had cracked during testing. The $18 million in equity funding allowed OceanGate to rebuild the Titan and move forward with its first Titanic expedition in 2021. Around this time, documents indicate that OceanGate may have had more control in the taken-over ownership of Cyclops 2 LLC.
But by 2023, OceanGate seemed to be on a much shakier financial footing. Several witnesses at the Coast Guard hearings testified to what they perceived to be OceanGate’s financial difficulties in the run-up to the final Titanic expedition, including Rush foregoing his salary and occasionally loaning the company money from his personal funds.
Demand for the $250,000 Titanic dives appeared to be tailing off. As late as May 2023, one of OceanGate’s affiliate sellers was advertising that there were still “some very limited dates and spots available at a 40 percent discount” for that summer’s expeditions. This has not been reported previously.
If the federal investigation results in any criminal charges, they would proceed alongside a civil lawsuit currently in a federal court in Washington state. In that case, the family of famed Titanic explorer Paul-Henri Nargeolet is seeking $50 million for his death aboard the Titan, with the lawsuit naming as defendants OceanGate, Rush’s estate, and a number of other individuals and companies connected to the ill-fated submersible. Rush’s estate recently filed a motion to dismiss the complaint against it, stating: “As Rush’s employer, OceanGate is liable for Rush’s alleged negligence.”
Maritime lawyer Alton Hall is skeptical that Nargeolet’s family will recover anything close to the $50 million they are seeking. A 1920 law, the Death on the High Seas Act, generally limits damages to pecuniary losses, such as future earnings. One exception would be if Nargeolet and his fellow Titan passengers, whom OceanGate dubbed “mission specialists,” qualified as seamen under another piece of legislation called the Jones Act. “There are literally books and books written on who is and who isn’t a Jones Act seaman,” says Hall. The passengers who died onboard the Titan “are not Jones Act seamen,” he believes.
An unknown question in these cases—and other cases that might be brought by the families of the two billionaires who also died on the Titan—is who might face legal consequences. The civil case against OceanGate and Rush’s estate also names as defendants OceanGate’s original director of engineering, Tony Nissen, and three companies that manufactured the Titan’s hull and viewport. However, multiple witnesses at the Coast Guard hearings testified to Stockton Rush having the final say in many commercial, engineering, and operational decisions, and his company is likely all but bankrupt. In the end, there might be little to salvage from the wreckage of OceanGate.
To study the cell membranes of deep-sea animals, the biochemist Itay Budin (center) joined forces with marine biologists Steve Haddock (right) and Jacob Winnikoff (left).
Photographs: From left: Tamrynn Clegg; Geoffroy Tobe; John Lee
“They are looking into an area that, to a large degree, has not been explored,” said Sol Gruner, who researches molecular biophysics at Cornell University; he was consulted for the study but was not a co-author.
Plasmalogen lipids are also found in the human brain, and their role in deep-sea membranes could help explain aspects of cell signaling. More immediately, the research unveils a new way that life has adapted to the most extreme conditions of the deep ocean.
Insane in the Membrane
The cells of all life on Earth are encircled by fatty molecules known as lipids. If you put some lipids in a test tube and add water, they automatically line themselves up back to back: The lipids’ greasy, water-hating tails commingle to form an inner layer, and their water-loving heads arrange together to form the outer portions of a thin membrane. “It’s just like oil and water separating in a dish,” Winnikoff said. “It’s universal to lipids, and it’s what makes them work.”
For a cell, an outer lipid membrane serves as a physical barrier that, like the external wall of a house, provides structure and keeps a cell’s insides in. But the barrier can’t be too solid: It’s studded with proteins, which need some wiggle room to carry out their various cellular jobs, such as ferrying molecules across the membrane. And sometimes a cell membrane pinches off to release chemicals into the environment and then fuses back together again.
For a membrane to be healthy and functional, it must therefore be sturdy, fluid, and dynamic at the same time. “The membranes are balancing right on the edge of stability,” Winnikoff said. “Even though it has this really well-defined structure, all the individual molecules that make up the sheets on either side—they’re flowing around each other all the time. It’s actually a liquid crystal.”
One of the emergent properties of this structure, he said, is that the middle of the membrane is highly sensitive to both temperature and pressure—much more so than other biological molecules such as proteins, DNA or RNA. If you cool down a lipid membrane, for example, the molecules move more slowly, “and then eventually they’ll just lock together,” Winnikoff said, as when you put olive oil in the fridge. “Biologically, that’s generally a bad thing.” Metabolic processes halt; the membrane can even crack and leak its contents.
To avoid this, many cold-adapted animals have membranes composed of a blend of lipid molecules with slightly different structures to keep the liquid crystal flowing, even at low temperatures. Because high pressure also slows a membrane’s flow, many biologists assumed that deep-sea membranes were built the same way.
Another surprising omission was during Thursday’s testimony of Mark Negley, a Boeing engineer. Negley had carried out a preliminary design study for the Titan and assisted OceanGate with testing equipment and advice for nearly a decade. He testified to the challenges of building carbon-fiber structures.
The panel did not ask Negley about an email he sent Rush in 2018 sharing an analysis based on information Rush had provided. “We think you are at a high risk of a significant failure at or before you reach 4,000 meters,” he wrote. The email included a chart showing a skull and crossbones at around that depth.
Many Red Flags, Few Solid Answers
This week also saw technical testimony from other expert witnesses about the design and classification of submersibles. All were skeptical, or outright critical, of OceanGate’s decision to operate Titan using a novel carbon-fiber hull with little testing, and relying on an unproven acoustic monitoring system for live information on the hull’s integrity.
“Instantaneous delamination and collapse can occur in less than a millisecond,” testified Roy Thomas from the American Bureau of Shipping. “Real-time monitoring could not capture this.”
Donald Kramer, a materials engineer at the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB), testified to there being manufacturing defects in the composite hull. He described the Titan’s wreckage as having peeled into layers of carbon fiber that matched its multistage construction, but he would not offer an opinion on what might have caused the implosion.
Neither the manufacturers of the hull nor OceanGate’s engineering director at the time of its construction were called to testify.
MBI chair Jason Neubauer said at a press conference after the hearings: “We do not have to obtain testimony from every witness. As long as we get factual information and data from the company, through forensics, and from other witnesses, it’s possible we don’t interview every witness that has been identified.”
Kramer noted that data from 2022, when an explosive bang was heard after the Titan surfaced after a dive to the Titanic, showed a worrying shift in strain in the hull. OceanGate’s then director of engineering, Phil Brooks, testified that he was probably not qualified to analyze that data, and that Rush personally cleared the submersible for its final dives.
Over the last two weeks, multiple witnesses had testified to Rush’s primary role in driving business, engineering, and operational decisions and to his abrasive personality and temper. Matthew McCoy, a technician at OceanGate in 2017 and a former Coast Guard officer, testified today about a conversation he had with Rush about getting the Titan registered and inspected.
McCoy recalled that Rush said that if the Coast Guard became a problem, he would “buy a Congressman and the problem would go away.” McCoy handed in his notice the following day.
What Happens Next
With the conclusion of the public hearings, the Coast Guard’s MBI will now start preparing its final report. That could include a definitive cause of the fatal accident, referrals for criminal investigations, and recommendations for future policy and regulations.
The Titan’s hull and viewport featured prominently in expert testimony about potential physical causes of the implosion. Regardless of which component ultimately failed, witnesses have leveled criticism at everyone from designers and manufacturers to OceanGate’s operational team and executive decisionmaking. This might make it difficult to ever fix on a single cause or to single out individuals who were to blame, with the exception of Stockton Rush.
Wreckage of theTitan’s innovative carbon fiber hull was found separated into three distinct layers, US National Transportation Safety Board engineer Donald Kramer has told a Coast Guard hearing into the fatal implosion of the OceanGate submersible in 2023.
Although Kramer would not offer an opinion on what caused the hull to delaminate into separate layers, he testified to multiple problems with the hull, beginning with its manufacture in 2020.
Using samples of carbon fiber saved from its construction, as well as dozens of pieces recovered from the seabed, the NTSB gave the most complete picture to date of the experimental nature of the Titan’s hull.
After the Titan’s first hull was found to have a crack and delamination following deep dives in 2019, OceanGate switched manufacturers to replace it.
The new manufacturer, Electroimpact, used a multistage process to wind and cure the five-inch-thick hull in five separate layers. Each layer would be baked at high temperature and pressure before being ground flat, having an adhesive sheet added, and another layer built on top. The idea of this multistep process was to reduce wrinkles in the final hull that the company believed had caused test models to fail short of their design depths.
However, Kramer testified that the NTSB found several anomalies in the fresh hull samples. There was waviness in four of the five layers, and wrinkles that got progressively worse from layer to layer. The NTSB also found that some layers had porosity—gaps in the resin material—four times larger than specified in the design. It also recorded voids between the five layers.
On Monday, Roy Thomas, a materials expert from the American Bureau of Shipping, told the hearing: “Defects such as voids, blisters on surface, and porosity can weaken carbon fiber, and under extreme hydrostatic pressure can accelerate the failure of a hull.”
OceanGate did not make any additional test models using the new multistage process.
The NTSB was able to recover many pieces of the carbon fiber hull from the seafloor, one still attached to one of the submersible’s titanium end domes. In a report issued simultaneously with Kramer’s testimony, the NTSB noted that there were few, if any, full-thickness hull pieces. All of the visible pieces had delaminated into three shells: the innermost of the five layers, a shell made of the second and third layers, and another with the fourth and fifth layers. Like an onion being peeled, the hull had largely separated at the adhesive joining the layers.
Debris of the Titan submersible on the seabed after imploding, captured on film by a remotely operated vehicle.Photograph: Reuters
After they left, the Titan was rebuilt with a new hull that was never tested to industry norms nor certified by an independent third-party agency. Patrick Lahey, CEO of submersible maker Triton Submarines, said that certifying a novel hull was not only possible but essential for safety.
“We were developing and certifying the deepest diving sub in the world at the same time they were developing this amateurish contraption,” he testified. “There was absolutely no reason they couldn’t have got it certified.”
A History of Troubled Titanic Missions
OceanGate’s first missions to the Titanic in 2021 were beset with problems, including the Titan’s forward titanium dome falling off after a dive, worrying readings on the acoustic monitoring system, and a thruster failing at 3,500 meters’ depth. One Coast Guard evidence slide showed 70 equipment issues requiring correction from the season’s dives. Things improved slightly the following year, with only 48 recorded issues. But these included dead batteries extending a mission from around seven to 27 hours, and the sub itself being damaged on recovery.
One dive in 2022 ended with a mysterious loud bang and cracking noise upon surfacing. Antonella Wilby, an OceanGate engineering contractor, was so worried about this bang she considered alerting OceanGate’s board of directors. She testified that another employee warned her that she risked being sued if she did so. “Anyone should feel free to speak up about safety without fear of retribution, and that is not at all what I saw,” she said. “I was entirely dismissed.”
On the Titan’s penultimate dive in 2023, contractor Tym Catterson admitted to failing to carry out a safety check; the Titan was left listing at a 45-degree angle for an hour, piling up those on board.
Conflicting Views on the Carbon Fiber Hull
There was conflicting testimony on the safety of the Titan’s unique carbon fiber hull. Dyer pointed out that carbon fiber could be a good fit for deep submersibles, and Nissen was adamant that computer modeling and the acoustic monitoring warning system meant that it could be used indefinitely. Lochridge, Catterson, and former HR director Bonnie Carl were all far more skeptical about the hull’s design and implementation. But all three acknowledged that they were not engineers.
Next week’s appearances by Nissen’s successor, Phil Brooks, more submersible engineers, and a carbon fiber expert from Boeing should address many of these questions. In particular, testimony next Wednesday from an engineer at the National Transportation Safety Board’s Materials Laboratory about the Titan’s wreckage may identify the physical cause of the implosion.
Where Was the Coast Guard?
At several points, investigators pointed out that the Titan should have been inspected by the US Coast Guard before carrying paying passengers. None of those questioned could say why it was not, despite OceanGate apparently contacting the Coast Guard on multiple occasions to provide notice of its underwater operations.
Lochridge also testified that OSHA had told him in 2018 that it had communicated his safety complaints to the Coast Guard. At least one of the five US Coast Guard witnesses being called next week is based in the Puget Sound, near OceanGate’s headquarters, and may be able to speak to this.
US Coast Guard Rear Admiral John Lockwood, who joined OceanGate’s board in 2013, is not on the witness list. Lochridge and Carl testified that Lockwood’s role was to provide oversight and smooth interactions with the Coast Guard.
Missing Witnesses
Nor is Lockwood the only notable absentee from the witness box. Multiple witnesses this week testified to the key roles of OceanGate employees, including Wendy Rush, Scott Griffith, and Neil McCurdy, in making crucial business, regulatory, and operational decisions throughout OceanGate’s history and on the day of the accident. None are being called to testify. Nor have any of the hulls’ manufacturers been called. The Coast Guard has not provided a reason for this other than to deny that it is because those witnesses would have asserted their Fifth Amendment rights to refuse to answer questions.
The US Coast Guard’s Titan submersible hearing kicked off with a startling revelation.
“I told him I’m not getting in it,” former OceanGate engineering director Tony Nissen said to a panel of Coast Guard investigators, referring to a 2018 conversation in which CEO Stockton Rush allegedly asked Nissen to act as a pilot in an upcoming expedition to the Titanic.
“It’s the operations crew, I don’t trust them,” Nissen told the investigators. “I didn’t trust Stockton either. You can take a look at where we started when I was hired. Nothing I got was the truth.”
Nissen’s testimony, which focused on the design, building, and testing of OceanGate’s first carbon fiber submersible, was a dramatic start to nearly two weeks of public testimony in the US Coast Guard Marine Board of Investigation’s hearings into the fatal June 2023 implosion of the Titan. Its five occupants, including Rush, all likely died instantly.
Before Nissen took the stand, the Coast Guard presented a detailed timeline of OceanGate as a company, the development of the Titan submersible, and its trips to the wreck of the Titanic, resting nearly 3,800 meters down in the north Atlantic. These slides revealed new information, including over 100 instances of equipment failures and incidents on the Titan’s trips in 2021 and 2022. An animated timeline of the final few hours of the Titan also included the final text messages sent by people on the sub. One sent at about 2,400 meters depth read “all good here.” The last message, sent as the sub slowed its descent at nearly 3,400 meters, read “dropped two wts.”
The Coast Guard also confirmed reports that the experimental carbon fiber sub had been stored in an outdoor parking lot in temperatures as low as 1.4 degrees Fahrenheit (–17 Celsius) in the run-up to last year’s Titanic missions. Some engineers worried that water freezing in or near the carbon fiber could expand and cause defects in the material.
Nissen said that almost from when he joined OceanGate in 2016, Rush kept changing the company’s direction. A move to certify the vessel with an independent third party fell by the wayside, as did plans to test more scale models of the Titan’s carbon fiber hull when one failed early under pressure. Rush then downgraded titanium components to save money and time. “It was death by a thousand cuts,” Nissen recalls.
He faced tough questioning about OceanGate’s choice of carbon fiber for a hull and its reliance on a newly developed acoustic monitoring system to provide an early warning of failure. One investigator raised WIRED’s reporting that an outside expert Nissen hired to assess the acoustic system later had misgivings about Rush’s understanding of its limitations.
“Given the time and constraints we had,” Nissen said, “we did all the testing and brought in every expert we could find. We built it like an aircraft.”
Nissen walked the Coast Guard board through deep-water testing in the Bahamas in 2018, during which he says the sub was struck by lightning. Measurements on the Titan’s hull later showed that it was flexing beyond its calculated safety factor. When a pilot subsequently found a crack in the hull, Nissen said, he wouldn’t sign off on another dive. “I killed it,” he testified. “The hull is done.” Nissen was subsequently fired.
This story originally appeared on WIRED Italia and has been translated from Italian.
For more than 10 years, Andrew Sweetman and his colleagues have been studying the ocean floor and its ecosystems, particularly in the Pacific’s Clarion-Clipperton Zone, an area littered with polymetallic nodules. As big as potatoes, these rocks contain valuable metals—lithium, copper, cobalt, manganese, and nickel—that are used to make batteries. They are a tempting bounty for deep-sea mining companies, which are developing technologies to bring them to the surface.
The nodules may be a prospective source of battery ingredients, but Sweetman believes they could already be producing something quite different: oxygen. Typically, the element is generated when organisms photosynthesize, but light doesn’t reach 4,000 meters below the ocean’s surface. Rather, as Sweetman and his team at the Scottish Association for Marine Science suggest in a new paper, the nodules could be driving a reaction that produces this “dark” oxygen from seawater.
Sweetman first noticed something strange in 2013. With his team, he’d been working to measure oxygen flow in confined areas within nodule-rich areas of the seabed. The flow of oxygen seemed to increase at the seafloor, despite the fact that there were no photosynthesizing organisms nearby, so much so that the researchers thought it was an instrumental anomaly.
The same finding, however, was repeated in 2021, albeit using a different measurement approach. The scientists were assessing changes in oxygen levels inside a benthic chamber, an instrument that collects sediment and seawater to create enclosed samples of the seabed environment. The instrument allowed them to analyze, among other things, how oxygen was being consumed by microorganisms within the sample environment. Oxygen trapped in the chamber should have decreased over time as organisms in the water and sediment consumed it, but it did the opposite: Despite the dark conditions preventing any photosynthetic reactions, oxygen levels in the benthic chamber increased.
The issue needed to be investigated. First, the team ascertained with certainty that any microorganisms capable of producing oxygen weren’t present. Once they were sure, the scientists hypothesized that polymetallic nodules captured in the benthic chamber might be involved. After several laboratory tests, Sweetman says, they found that the nodules act like a geobattery: They generate a small electric current (about 1 volt each) that splits water molecules into their two components, hydrogen and oxygen, in a process called electrolysis.
How the nodules produce oxygen, however, is not entirely clear: It’s not known what generates the electric current, whether the reaction is continuous, and crucially, whether the oxygen production is significant enough to sustain an ecosystem.
Then there’s an even bigger question: What if the electrolysis induced by the polymetallic nodules was the spark that started life on Earth? According to Sweetman, this is an exciting hypothesis that should be explored further. It might even be possible that this could take place on other worlds, and be a potential source of alien life.
These possibilities add weight to the argument that the deep seabed is a delicate environment that needs to be protected from industrial exploitation. (There is already a petition, signed by more than 800 marine scientists from 44 different countries, that highlights the broader environmental risks of deep sea mining and calls for a pause on its development.)
But with many questions unanswered, some are casting doubt on the findings. The biggest criticisms have come from within the seabed-mining world: Patrick Downes of the Metals Company, a seabed-mining company that works in deep water—the same waters Sweetman studied and that partly funded Sweetman’s research—says the results are the result of oxygen contamination from outside sources, and that his company will soon produce a paper refuting the thesis put forward by Sweetman’s group.
Samantha Joye, an oceanographer and microbiologist, has traveled to the deep sea in submersibles dozens of times.
But for all her passion and experience in the ocean, she would have never stepped foot in the Titan, the experimental sub that imploded last month during a dive to view the wreckage of the Titanic, killing all five people on board.
“As someone who dives in subs for a living, I would not dive in any vehicle that is not DNV GL certified,” said Joye, a professor at the University of Georgia, referring to the international safety society that certifies manned submersibles. “And I would not dive in a vehicle fabricated from titanium/carbon fiber. Seriously…OMG.”
Stockton Rush, the CEO and founder of OceanGate, violated numerous established norms and safety standards in developing the Titan. And he wasn’t shy about it.
“I’d like to be remembered as an innovator,” he said during a YouTube interview in 2021. “I think it was Gen. [Douglas] MacArthur who said, ‘You’re remembered for the rules you break.’ I’ve broken some rules to make this. I think I’ve broken them with logic and good engineering behind me. The carbon fiber and titanium — there’s a rule you don’t do that. Well, I did.”
The hulls of most deep-ocean subs are engineered from solid materials such as titanium, steel and acrylic, which can withstand repeated trips to extreme depths. Though carbon fiber is a go-to material in the aerospace industry, it is known to crack, fray and delaminate over time when exposed to such pressure — signs of which David Lochridge, OceanGate’s director of marine operations and chief pilot, observed in the Titan’s hull in early 2018, The New Yorker’s Ben Taub reported. Lochridge flagged the defects in a report to Rush and others at the company and was promptly fired.
Though many details about what exactly happened to the Titan remain unclear, Rush’s antipathy toward well-established rules and safety standards ultimately ended in tragedy. As Rush piloted the vessel, it experienced a catastrophic implosion on a June 18 dive, which experts speculate was likely the result of faulty engineering.
For 60 years, the small community of engineers, scientists and explorers involved in deep ocean submergence operated with a near-perfect safety record: zero fatalities and no major accidents. They hoped to keep it that way through rigorous certification and safety protocols for all manned underwater vehicles.
Many had long seen OceanGate for what it would ultimately become: a threat to that stellar record.
“The certification protocols that all other deep submergence vehicles, except [the Titan], that carry passengers, especially paying passengers — all over the world, in tropical waters, deep coral reefs, other wreck sites — the safety record is the gold standard,” James Cameron, the film director and deep-sea explorer, told ABC News following the Titan’s disappearance. “Not only no fatalities, but no major incidents requiring all of these assets to converge to a site.”
A deadly implosion was always in the back of the community’s mind, said Cameron, who helped design the Deepsea Challenger submersible and in 2012 piloted it to the Challenger Deep, the deepest known point of any ocean on Earth.
“That’s the nightmare that we’ve all lived with,” he said.
This undated photo shows OceanGate’s Titan submersible during a descent.
On a dive day, Bruce Strickrott wakes up early — around 3 a.m. — to begin a longstanding routine. He lies in bed and runs through the day’s mission in his head — the geography of the site, the target locations, scientific goals, the backgrounds of other crew members and any potential environmental challenges.
He calls it a “personal pre-dive” to get “dialed in” for the day’s work.
Few people have more experience in the deep ocean than Strickrott, manager and chief pilot of Alvin, the Navy-owned, three-person deep-sea submersible that is most famous for exploring the wreckage of the Titanic in 1986.
Since joining the Alvin group in 1996, Strickrott has been laser-focused on safety — a philosophy that he says is rooted in years of witnessing firsthand how the experience of traveling to the deep sea changes and inspires people. He calls himself a “zealot” for manned exploration of the world’s oceans.
“You have a visceral experience of being in a place that would kill you but being completely comfortable there, such that you can have this awakening, as I call it,” he said. “You can’t describe it. It’s very difficult, even with images. It’s not until you take people there and you basically are given the opportunity to share it with them. It becomes a personal mission to do it well, because you want them to walk away feeling like, ‘Holy cow, I just — I won’t be able to forget that.’”
“In order to enable that for others, you have to make sure it’s safe.”
Bruce Strickrott, the manager and chief pilot of Alvin, stands in front of the submersible during a recent expedition. He has piloted about 400 dives in the historic vessel.
For Alvin, which is operated by Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute in Massachusetts, that involves routine inspections, recertifications and Navy audits. Every few years, the sub is completely disassembled, evaluated and put back together. It has undergone numerous upgrades over the last decade to allow it to dive deeper, and it’s now capable of accessing 99% of the ocean floor.
The sub’s systems, including life support and propulsion, also feature numerous redundancies to allow for its operator to continue to maneuver and surface the vehicle if a component were to fail. For example, there are multiple ways to release the heavy weights that carry the sub to the seafloor and are dropped when it returns to the surface.
But day-to-day, it is the crew of Alvin pilots and engineers that forms the front-line of safety. Prior to each dive, they meticulously test and check all components and systems. If an issue — a “Delta,” as Strickrott calls it — is discovered, the crew either fixes and rechecks the device or the dive is called off.
“During the pre-dive checks, as a pilot, there’s a lot of work to do,” Strickrott said. “You get very good at it. It becomes routine. But you have to force yourself to do them as if this is the first time. You have to dial your attention. You choose to be attentive, to look for things.”
Strickrott likes to remind his crew of times when Alvin members did just that. In the mid-2000s, for example, the Alvin team had procured new windows for the sub that had been pressure tested and appeared flawless. After a couple of dives with one of the new windows installed, the Alvin launch coordinator was looking the sub over ahead of another launch when he noticed “the most tiny, little Delta — this little image on the inner surface,” Strickrott said.
“He flagged it. And when we looked at it, we agreed and we delayed the dive and we pulled the window,” he said. “It turned out it was a material flaw that had started.”
Strickrott said the deformation would not have led to a catastrophic failure but would have gotten progressively worse with each dive. The incident ultimately led to several changes, including how the crew polishes the sub’s viewports.
“This is a really good example where a personally applied standard — nobody forced him to do that, he just felt obligated to because of his responsibility — made a difference,” he said.
Strickrott said he and others have spent decades fostering a culture on the Alvin team that is invested in a hierarchy of priorities: safety of the sub crew and other Alvin support personnel, safety of the vessel and, finally, the mission. He subscribes to the idea that there are three things that can get you in trouble: ignorance, arrogance and complacency.
“Whatever it takes to get home safely, you do it,” he said. “If you look at every day as an opportunity to dive … and you think, ‘We’d love to be in the water today, but we don’t have to.’ There isn’t anything pressuring us to go in the water except for one thing: If you go in, you have to come back.”
Alvin, a three-person deep-sea submersible, began operating in 1964.
Luis Lamar /Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution
On his office wall in Woods Hole, Strickrott has an undated quote from George Broderson, an early Alvin crew chief and mechanic, that appears in Victoria Kaharl’s 1990 book, “Water Baby: The Story of Alvin.”
“As deck senior, bo’s’un, honcho, crew chief, whatever… I attempt to keep the crew happy. So long as they get a kind word, they put out their best effort. I take the check-off list and I sign it. That means I have to trust each individual plus the fact that I double-check it anyway. Makes it a little bit more safe… It’s not exactly dangerous, but it can become hairy. It takes a combined effort to launch and recover the submarine. And the sun beats down, the hours go on.
You prepare the sub for a dive and you know when it’s all through, you’re going to have to postdive the sub because it cannot stand not being taken care of.”
Strickrott sees his role as helping further a legacy that many before him helped build.
“We’ve got 58 years of history and a legacy to uphold for people like this guy,” he said. “I think the other part of our responsibility — safety — is to live up to what those guys did. It sounds like a bunch of gobbledegook, but this is how I feel. And I’ve come to feel this way for a long time.”
Alvin’s crew in Boston on May 12, 1966, after the submersible recovered a lost hydrogen bomb off the coast of Spain. From left are pilot Marvin J. McCamis, crew chief George Broderson and pilot Valentine P. Wilson.
Worst Fears Come True
Unlike Alvin, the Titan was never classed or certified by an independent organization. Its main dive target, the wreckage of the Titanic, which sank in 1912, is located in international waters, meaning the sub was not subject to any government’s laws or regulations. Its one viewport was certified for only 1,300 meters, only one-third of the depth of the Titanic’s resting place.
In 2018, 38 expert members of the Marine Technology Society, a leading industry group, sent OceanGate a letter voicing their deep concern about the Titan and the company’s planned excursions to the famous shipwreck.
“Our apprehension is that the current experimental approach adopted by OceanGate could result in negative outcomes (from minor to catastrophic) that would have serious consequences for everyone in the industry,” the group wrote. The letter touted the industry’s stellar safety record and pleaded with OceanGate to adhere to established standards. “Our members are all aware of how important and precious this standing is and deeply concerned that a single negative event could undo this.”
Rush dismissed this and other experts’ safety concerns, including from some of his own employees, repeatedly arguing that regulation stymies innovation.
When deep sea explorer Rob McCallum emailed Rush in 2018 to warn that he was putting himself and others at risk, Rush fired back that he was “tired of industry players who try to use a safety argument to stop innovation.”
“We have heard the baseless cries of ‘you are going to kill someone’ way too often,” he wrote, according to emails first obtained by the BBC. “I take this as a serious personal insult.”
In a now-deleted 2019 blog post titled “Why Isn’t Titan Classed?,” OceanGate wrote that “bringing an outside entity up to speed on every innovation before it is put into real-world testing is anathema to rapid innovation” and compared what it was doing to SpaceX, billionaire Elon Musk’s rocket and spacecraft manufacturer, which at the time, unlike OceanGate, was advancing its rocket capabilities without passengers on board. Many liftoffs ended in fiery explosions.
Experts HuffPost spoke with dismissed the comparison as patently false, pointing out that SpaceX vehicles are subject to myriad U.S. regulations, particularly the vehicles that have carried people.
“I will never understand how this ‘adventure’ was sold to paying customers,” Joye said. “I know people participating had to sign a waiver, but I don’t believe that they truly understood the risk they were taking. The Titan should have had ‘Experimental Prototype’ plastered all over it in 100-point type.”
Stockton Rush (left), the CEO and co-founder of OceanGate, died aboard the Titan submersible when it imploded last month.
“At some point, safety just is pure waste,” he said. “I mean, if you just want to be safe, don’t get out of bed. Don’t get in your car. Don’t do anything.”
Experts say Titan’s fate only further confirms the importance of strong safety protocols when operating in the unforgiving deep sea.
“There’s an industry standard for a reason,” said Erik Cordes, a deep sea ecologist and professor at Temple University. “You can’t skimp around the certification process just to advance the technology. That’s not a good enough reason when you’re actually putting people on the bottom of the ocean.” (I dove aboard Alvin with Joye off the Atlantic coast in 2018. Strickrott was the expedition leader on the two-week expedition. Cordes was the chief scientist.)
Strickrott was one of the experts who signed on to the letter of concern to OceanGate in 2018 in his personal capacity. In his interview with HuffPost, he mostly steered away from discussing the Titan accident or criticizing OceanGate but said he’s followed updates closely and sees the incident as an opportunity to both reflect on what the Alvin team does well and explore what it can do better.
“I think it’s important for us to try to get away from the finger-pointing. There were mistakes made, but there were people that died,” he said. “I think it’s a renewed dedication to keep at it and keep doing it right.”
An Eye Toward The Future
The Titan’s highly controversial design and lack of third-party certification stands in stark contrast to Alvin and virtually every other submersible operating in the deep sea. Yet its demise has tarnished a decades-long safety record and thrust the entire industry into the spotlight, with some calling for more stringent regulations.
The U.S. Coast Guard last month launched an investigation to determine the cause of the implosion, if “an act of misconduct, incompetence, negligence, unskillfulness, or willful violation of law” contributed to the disaster, and whether new laws or regulations are warranted to prevent future disasters.
The Titan incident may have brought public scrutiny to the industry, but it hasn’t rattled Cordes’ confidence in the field.
“I think there is a really important place for manned exploration,” he said. “I don’t think you can do everything with [remotely operated vehicles]. It’s just not the same.”
Samantha Joye and Erik Cordes hug after an Alvin dive to a methane seep in 2018.
Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, U.S. Geological Survey, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration
“I have no fear that this is going to have a major negative on deep-sea vehicles,” he said. “I think in some ways it might reinvigorate interest.”
Strickrott fiercely disagrees with the idea that safety standards stifle innovation. He acknowledged that the certification process can be time consuming, even frustrating, but said the end result is worth it.
“One of the things we get is we are not relying on ourselves for these really important things,” he said. “We’re getting a second opinion from a group of subject matter experts.”
“The alternative to doing it well is pretty awful,” he added. “In fact, it means the end to all those things you care about.”
Though the scientific value of deep sea exploration is obvious, Strickrott says it offers something much more profound for those fortunate enough to travel to the deep.
“What you’re experiencing is something I think people take for granted in their daily lives, which is that humans have reached a point in their evolution where we modify the world around us. One way we do that is through technology,” he said. “I think it’s a reflection of what the power of being human really is.”
In the decades-old quote that adorns Strickrott’s office wall, Broderson reflected on the struggles of keeping Alvin in the water and the magnitude of the work:
“Yeah, the thing has a grip on us. You don’t want to yell quits because you know that you can lick whatever it is, and in doing so, you put yourself in a special class, you know you’ve done something important. Basically we’re an adventure outfit. Takes some of the sting out of the long hours.”
The human brain is wired for adventure, Strickrott said. It’s part of who we are. It’s why NASA has planned new missions to the moon and set its sights on eventually reaching Mars, he said.
“If people are thinking this is the death knell for exploring the bottom of the ocean — first of all, I don’t,” Strickrott said. “My God, there’s so much left. There are generations of opportunities. We really want people to be inspired and to consider this.”
“We’re supposed to do these wacky things,” he added. “Whenever people ask, ‘Should we stop?’ I always remind them that that is a good way to limit our ability to learn things.”
