Hardly anyone has been rescued from a submarine or submersible. None of them were remotely as deep as the Titanic.
- A rescue effort is underway after a submersible exploring the Titanic wreck went missing on Sunday.
- The Titan submersible is carrying five people and could run out of oxygen by Thursday afternoon.
Rescuers are racing against time to locate the Titan submersible, which went missing while on a dive mission to the Titanic shipwreck on Sunday morning.
The vessel — carrying five people — lost contact with its support ship, the Polar Prince, one hour and 45 minutes into its descent off the coast of Cape Cod, Massachusetts.
The crew's chances of survival are low, experts have predicted. The deteriorating two-piece wreckage of the infamous Titanic liner is located off the southeast coast of Newfoundland, at a depth of around 12,500 feet.
Historically, there have not been many successful rescues from sunken submarines or submersibles, according to a NewsNation report. And rescue missions that have been successful were not remotely as deep.
The Russian AS-28
One of the latest submarine disasters that was averted was in August 2005, when a Russian AS-28 submarine became tangled in a fishing net during a military exercise off the far eastern Kamchatka peninsula.
The seven Russian submariners were trapped 625 feet down on the Pacific Ocean floor, with a rapidly diminishing air supply.
But rescue teams from the US and UK were later able to free the vessel, with four to six hours of air remaining.
Royal Navy HMS K13
The Royal Navy HMS K13 submarine was on a training mission in Gareloch, Scotland in 1917 when one of the boiler rooms flooded.
That meant the submarine was unable to level out at 20 feet, and it was dragged underwater.
Some members of the crew, who were able to lock themselves in a room of the vessel, were trapped for around 57 hours before rescuers were able to attach an airline to the ballasts and inflate them to bring the submarine back to the surface.
Of the 80 people on board, only 48 made it.
USS Squalus
The rescue team responded quickly and was able to get out the surviving 32 crew members and one civilian from the forward sections of the vessel on the following day.
The Pisces III
The deepest sub rescue in history was that of former Navy pilots Roger Mallinson and Roger Chapman in September 1973, according to the BBC.
The men used a small submersible, called Pisces III, to lay transatlantic telephone cables on the seabed of the Celtic Seat.
But when a hatch broke off the aft compartment, the vessel plunged to a depth of 1,575 feet. Over two days, rescue teams worked to bring the vessel to the surface. The men had only 12 minutes of oxygen left when they were finally rescued.
But the Titanic — where Titan was traveling to on Sunday morning — lies much deeper than the Pisces III ever went at 12,500 feet.
The Titan crew only has between 70 and 96 hours of emergency oxygen left, the US Coast Guard estimated on Monday afternoon. Those estimates mean the oxygen in the submersible will likely last until Thursday afternoon on Eastern Standard Time at the latest.
The dive of the Titan submersible, owned by OceanGate Expeditions, usually takes about eight hours, which includes the descent and ascent, according to its website.
It weighs around 23,000 lbs and can go down to a depth of around 13,100 feet, the website added. It is unclear what happened to the submersible and how close to the Titanic it was when it went missing.
Titan is also a submersible, not a submarine, which means that it is launched from a support ship similar to how a boat deposits a scuba diver into an area of the ocean to explore.
A submarine, on the other hand, can launch itself into the ocean independently, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.