The story of the Titan submersible is not over yet

Titan submersible

 Four days had passed without news of the fate of the submersible Titan and the five people it was carrying when Rear Admiral John Mauger, commander of the First Coast Guard District, addressed the cameras last Thursday. After the long wait, the news that all five were presumed dead, from an instantaneous collapse of the vessel under tremendous pressure, sounded to many like an agonising but definitive end to the story. There were no more scheduled briefings, added Lieutenant Samantha Corcoran.

But this is not the end of the story, as devastating as the news was. It can't be. Underwater travel should and will continue. Whether as research to better understand our planet, or as tourism to invite people to imagine and appreciate so much unseen life. To ensure the safety and security of all those who go down, the hardest work is still to come.

Confirmation of Titan's demise answers the most immediate and overwhelming question. But it raises many more. Why was OceanGate Expeditions, the company that owned and operated the vessel, allowed to put people in an uncertified and experimental submersible? Why had the head of the company, Stockton Rush, failed to heed serious concerns about safety issues? Should we change a system in which so much effort and expense has gone into rescuing a few millionaires and adventurers, especially when thousands of migrants are dying at sea unattended? Which nation's responsibility was it, and whose should it have been? And what does the loss of the Titan mean for the future of underwater research by human beings?

To answer these and many other questions, we need a thorough investigation, conducted in the open, with the aim of establishing clear lines of accountability - and clear consequences.

The ship from which the submersible was launched, the Polar Prince, has Canadian registry. It is based in Canada. Because of this responsibility, the Canadian Transportation Safety Board announced that it would investigate not only the sinking but "the circumstances of this operation". The US Coast Guard declared the loss a "major marine casualty". It also said it would convene a Marine Board of Investigation with the US National Transportation Safety Board. These are positive developments. But much depends on how the mandate is carried out. The scope of the investigation, the manner in which it is conducted, the degree of transparency it maintains, and the force of its findings should be of vital concern not only to the underwater community, but to everyone.

There is reason to hope that some good can be salvaged from a terrible wreck. Coincidentally, it's been more than a century since the Titanic sank on a cold April morning in 1912. The U.S. Senate and the British Board of Trade conducted investigations into the loss of the ocean liner. These investigations led to the Safety of Life at Sea Convention, which required almost all ocean-going ships to carry adequate lifeboats, to carry out lifeboat drills, to use standard distress signals and to respond to ships in distress - hence the robust and extensive rescue operation for the Titanic. Today, ocean shipping is regulated by a myriad of conventions and laws, with international treaties - overseen by the United Nations' International Maritime Organisation - ensuring that all ships, no matter where they come from, meet certain standards.

However, submersibles are not subject to these rules. They are usually governed by national regulations and operate only in territorial waters.

Titan submersible

The thrill-seeking horizon now extends to private rocket rides with stratospheric prices. As risky as these ventures may seem, those launched in the United States operate under the jurisdiction of the Federal Aviation Administration and within the parameters of the 1967 Outer Space Treaty. Under the 1982 United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, the Titanic wreck site is in international waters. The sea beyond territorial waters is still a lawless ocean. The United States has not even ratified the UN Convention. So how can we prevent another Titanic disaster?

The first option is for the International Maritime Organisation to set safety standards for submersibles. This would require them to be registered with a nation, much like ocean-going ships. This would put the onus on the flag state to ensure that the submersible meets these requirements. It would also allow other countries, through port state control, to do the same level of testing and inspection of these submersibles.

A second option would be to adopt a provision from the Outer Space Treaty, which says that states have jurisdiction over national activities that are carried out by governmental or non-governmental entities. In other words, if Titan's launch was from a Canadian ship, from a Canadian port, Canada would have jurisdiction. At the moment, it's unclear which country has jurisdiction in the Titan investigation because the ship was reportedly built in the United States but launched from a Canadian ship.

Another idea that is being widely discussed to prevent similar disasters is to put an end to human travel to the deep sea, especially for tourists who pay a fee. That would be a terrible mistake.

It's wonderful that unmanned vehicles can beam us high-definition, 4K video of marine life and shipwrecks. But nothing can replace the value of the human eye. Nothing can replace the experience of taking a small boat out to a submersible, climbing in, closing the hatch and feeling the sea swirl around the vessel as it begins its descent. People climb Everest to see that view, or strap themselves into rockets to see Earth from above. The same urge will always pull people down to see the deepest depths.

When the first sailboats failed to return home and the first steamboats caught fire, we did not stop sailing. When the Titanic sank, killing over 1,500, we did not stop crossing the Atlantic. When the first commercial jets suffered fatal crashes, we did not give up jet travel. The same goes for space travel and almost every other form of human endeavour. It has been 63 years since the bathyscaph Trieste plunged to the bottom of the Mariana Trench - Challenger Deep, a depth about two and a half times that of the Titanic. Let us not let this be the last to be said about submersibles.

If humanity retreats from submersibles and relies only on remotely operated vehicles, will we also retreat from other endeavours that put us in harm's way but offer the potential for scientific discovery and human understanding of the greatest mysteries of the planet? As we watch the next rocket blast off into the vacuum of space, we should remember that we have conquered that frontier through trial and error, and we will do the same with the great pressures of the deep sea.