An animation posted to YouTube that depicts how the OceanGate Titan submersible carrying five people to see the wreck of the Titanic imploded last month has been viewed more than 6 million times in the 12 days since it was posted.
AiTelly, a YouTube channel that posts engineering animation explainers, created the more than 6-minute clip.
The animation shows how the submersible would have reacted to the enormous pressure it would have encountered as it descended into the North Atlantic.
At 12,500 feet below the ocean’s surface, the place where the RMS Titanic came to rest after it hit an iceberg and sank in 1912, “there is around 5,600 pounds per square inch of pressure,” the video says.
The Titan is believed to have imploded on June 18 just short of two hours after it left its mothership diving to the wreck of the Titanic.
The passengers on the vessel — father and son Shahzada and Suleman Dawood, Stockton Rush, Paul-Henri Nargeolet and Hamish Harding — all died in the accident. According to the U.S. Coast Guard, human remains were found in the wreckage.
According to the video, the Titan’s carbon fiber hull could not withstand the high hydrostatic pressure in the surrounding water and would have crumpled “within a fraction of a millisecond,” the narrator said.
The animation shows an OceanGate-branded submersible being crushed and torn apart.
“Existing technology is based on steel, titanium, and aluminum. These are what kept other submarines from being crushed. But the Titan has had an experimental design,” the video noted.
A spokesperson for AiTelly told The New York Post that the animation was created by taking information and measurements posted about the sub on OceanGate’s website along with information from Google and then plugging it into 3D modeling software.
