The Titanic submersible likely imploded so quickly that the five victims on board "never knew it happened," an expert has claimed.
Tributes are being paid to the victims who lost their lives on the underwater vessel - known as the Titan - which intended to embark on a 12,500 feet deep dive into the North Atlantic Ocean to see the infamous Titanic wreckage on Sunday (June 18).
An hour and 45 minutes into the expedition, the sub - operated by OceanGate - lost contact with its mothership, the Polar Prince, and failed to provide a signal which prompted a major search operation headed by the US Coast Guard as well as the private company.
The search to recover the vessel become critical on Thursday (June 22) after initial estimates stated that the submersible had a 96-hour oxygen supply, which had already elapsed.
However, events continued to take a turn for the worse after the US Coast Guard announced during a press conference that rescuers found debris from an external part of the submersible "consistent with the catastrophic loss of the pressure chamber".
"This is an incredibly unforgiving environment down there on the sea floor," First Coast Guard District commander Rear Adm. John Mauger said. "The debris is consistent with a catastrophic implosion of the vessel."
In a statement to NBC News, OceanGate then confirmed that the five passengers - who paid $250,000 to board the vessel - are now presumed to be dead, stating: "We now believe that our CEO Stockton Rush, Shahzada Dawood and his son Suleman Dawood, Hamish Harding, and Paul-Henri Nargeolet, have sadly been lost.
"These men were true explorers who shared a distinct spirit of adventure, and a deep passion for exploring and protecting the world's oceans," OceanGate continued. "Our hearts are with these five souls and every member of their families during this tragic time. We grieve the loss of life and joy they brought to everyone they knew."
An expert named Ofer Ketter weighed in on the catastrophic incident and stated that an implosion would've transpired very quickly if something breached the hull of the vessel to generate a loss in pressure.
"They never knew it happened," he said of the five victims, as reported by The New York Post. "Which is actually very positive in this very negative situation."
Ketter - co-founder of a private submersible company called Sub-Merge - told the publication the collapse would have been "instantaneous", adding it would have happened "before even their brain could even send a type of message to their body that they’re having pain."
According to The New York Post, the bodies of the missing sub's five explorers are unlikely to be recovered.
Dr. Peter Girguis, oceanographer and Harvard University professor, also spoke about the devasting situation and compared the submersible to a scuba tank. "When a scuba tank is overfilled," he said. "There’s a safety device that releases gas very quickly. At least that’s the plan."
He also noted that "When you take the equivalent of a scuba tank and you want it to hold the pressure out, it’s a different story - because if you go beyond the strength of the vessel, then it crushes or collapses."
Regarding the implosion itself, he added: "We tend to believe they [are] swift and they tend to be complete, but I want to emphasize again, we don’t exactly know."
The investigation into what caused the sub to implode is ongoing.
Ketter remarked that it shouldn’t have happened "because we know how to build submersibles for them not to implode."
"So, when do implosions happen? To be honest and to be frank, when the engineering is wrong in its calculations," he said. "When either the structure, the material, the testing, the seals - any other part of the submersible that was designed to go to that depth - was designed wrong and didn’t withstand the pressures that it was designed to."
Our thoughts are with everybody impacted by this developing situation.
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