Will the bodies of the 'Titan Five' ever be recovered from the ocean depths?

As the world reels from the story of the 'Titan Five', many questions regarding those onboard the doomed Titan submersible remain unanswered.

The ill-fated sub - operated by OceanGate, a Washington-based private company - started its expedition to the infamous Titanic wreckage located approximately 12,500 feet under the ocean's surface and 900 miles from Cape Cod, Massachusetts, last Sunday.

OceanGate founder Stockton Rush has always been ambitious about exploring the ocean depths, a motivation he discussed at a conference by GeekWire, a Seattle tech news site, last year.

He said at the time: "One of the reasons I started the business was because I didn’t understand why we were spending 1,000 times as much money to explore space as we were to explore [...] the oceans. There is no private access to the deep ocean, and yet there’s all this life to be discovered.

However, about an hour and 45 minutes into the exploration, the Titan submersible lost communication with its surface ship, the Polar Prince. The submarine was stocked with a four-day emergency oxygen supply, per The Independent.

The unfortunate crew onboard included OceanGate's CEO Stockton Rush, British billionaire explorer Hamish Harding, French maritime and Titanic expert Paul-Henry Nargeolet, and Pakistani tycoon Shahzada Dawood and his son Suleman Dawood.

On Thursday, the US Coast Guard revealed that the sub was lost in a "catastrophic implosion" near the Titanic wreck in the Atlantic, likely killing all of those on board. They also indicated that the bodies of the five passengers aboard the ill-fated Titan submersible may never be retrieved.

The aftermath of the incident revealed the pressure chamber of the OceanGate Titan among other debris, situated around 1,600ft from the Titanic's bow on the seabed, identified by a remote-operated vehicle (ROV) last Thursday.

US Coast Guard Rear Admiral John Mauger spoke about the challenging conditions at the ocean floor, describing it as "an incredibly unforgiving environment," adding that, "This is an incredibly complex operating environment on the sea floor over two miles beneath the surface."

The sudden and tragic loss is indeed a painful ordeal for the families of the explorers, their grief amplified by the mystery surrounding the fate of their loved ones -- a poignant echo of the original Titanic tragedy over a century ago.

Given the inability to recover bodies from the Titanic wreckage, it's anticipated that a similar fate awaits the passengers of the Titan submersible - largely due to the violent nature of the implosion and the harsh deep-sea environment.

Per USA Today, no bodies have ever been found from the wreckage of the Titanic at a depth of 12,500 feet, where over 1,100 passengers are likely to have dissolved after years of salt-water erosion and undersea life foraging.

Aileen Maria Marty, a disaster medicine expert at Florida International University's Herbert Wertheim College of Medicine, explained to the outlet the brutal reality of the implosion, stating: "The force was compressing so rapidly that those bodies and souls had nowhere to go."

She further added that because of the extreme force, "it’s very, very unlikely you’ll find any distinguishable body parts."

Due to the extreme conditions and catastrophic implosion, the fate of the five lost individuals may remain a mystery, leaving their families grappling with unanswered questions.

The extremities of the deep sea, its immense pressure, absolute darkness, and freezing temperatures, combined with the trauma inflicted by the sudden pressure change during the implosion, pose significant challenges for recovery efforts.

Marty shed further light on the violent nature of the implosion, stating: "For something that size, the whole thing is going to crush in about 1 millisecond. So when it actually happened, their brains didn’t have time to know it was happening."

Such unfortunate incidents mirror the tragic loss during the Titanic disaster, when over 1,500 lives were lost in the North Atlantic. Many bodies, severely damaged or decomposed, were buried at sea, while only over 200 bodies were able to be recovered by the rescue teams.

Our thoughts continue to go out to everybody impacted by this tragedy.

Featured image credit: Anadolu Agency / Getty