The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) has released an audio clip of the moment of the deadly OceanGate Titan implosion. The recording, quietly released last week through the US Defense Visual Information Distribution Service (DVIDS), is the first of its kind to be publicly released by government officials, and comes over two years after the controversial submersible’s five passengers died en route to the Titanic’s wreckage in the North Atlantic.
The sound of the implosion was captured on June 18, 2023 by a moored passive acoustic recorder roughly 900 miles away from the deadly event. The brief clip begins with a few moments of relative silence before a deep, sustained rumbling that nears 400 Hz, according to an accompanying frequency graph.
Founded in 2007, OceanGate first began offering private dives to the historic luxury liner’s remains in 2021. For as much as $250,000-per-seat, tourists could ride inside the company’s 22-foot-long submersible on a 2.5-mile journey to the UNESCO underwater cultural heritage site. Titan conducted multiple excursions over the next two years, but often encountered technical issues and communications blackouts with its surface ship crew. Throughout its excursions, multiple international maritime organizations and experts repeatedly voiced concerns about potential design flaws in the submersible, as well as the company’s overall operations.
“Your marketing material advertises that the Titan design will meet or exceed the DNV-GL safety standards, yet it does not appear that OceanGate has the intention of following DNV-GL class rules,” reads one such letter from 2018, referring to the internationally recognized maritime industry regulatory organization. “Your representation is, at minimum, misleading to the public and breaches an industry-wide professional code of conduct we all endeavor to uphold.”
On June 18, 2023, Titan radio communications ceased approximately 103 minutes into a dive that included OceanGate CEO Stockton Rush and four others. Officials announced that remotely operated vehicles (ROVs) had located submersible debris near the Titanic on June 22, capping a frantic international search that ultimately encompassed over 10,000 miles of Atlantic Ocean. Experts later confirmed that Titan suffered a near-instantaneous implosion likely due to a flaw in its hull integrity. At that depth, surrounding water exerts the equivalent of 5,500 pounds per square inch (psi) of force on an object. Such pressure would have caused Titan to implode in less than 20 milliseconds—faster than a human brain could register the event.
The US Coast Guard’s final salvage mission took place in October 2023, and included the retrieval of “additional presumed human remains.” During the Marine Board of Investigation public hearings in September 2024, experts confirmed the Titan implosion generated an approximately 30,000-square-meter debris field.
While recovery efforts collected hundreds of debris fragments, a number of larger portions of wreckage were too heavy to bring to the surface. They currently rest around 1,600 feet from the Titanic.
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