The US Navy may have heard the Titan imploding as early as Sunday using an underwater microphone usually used to track enemy submarines.
According to the Navy, the sound was picked up several hours after the team of five set off on their expedition to the Titanic on the ocean floor.
On Sunday afternoon, a team of five tourists who each paid close to €230,000 to view the Titanic at the bottom of the ocean boarded the Titan submarine. An hour and 45 minutes after their descent to the seabed began, the Titan disappeared and all signal was lost.
It was confirmed on Friday night that the Titan imploded under the pressure of its deep dive as the submarine was only built to withstand the pressure at a depth of 1,300 metres and not 4,000 metres. All five passengers have been now declared dead, after a week-long international search operation.
According to a US defence official, the US Navy began listening for the Titan almost immediately after contact with the submarine was lost. Using a top-secret underwater microphone system used by the US Navy to track enemy submarines, the Navy may have caught the sound of Titan's implosion.
A senior Navy official confirmed to CNN that they detected the sound several hours after the mini-submarine set off towards the Titanic's wreck.
"The US Navy conducted an analysis of acoustic data and detected an anomaly consistent with an implosion or explosion near where the Titan submarine was operating when communications were lost," a senior US Navy official told The Wall Street Journal. According to the official, the information was immediately shared to assist in the search and rescue mission.
Double standards?
The international efforts to find the Titan and its five passengers have attracted criticism due to the imbalance of spending used to find a few compared to that used to find the hundreds of migrants who drowned last week in the Mediterranean Sea.
The shipwreck that took place early Wednesday morning has been called the deadliest shipwreck in the Mediterranean Sea in years and around 500 people are expected to be missing.
