Ocean science The University of Washington building in Seattle is an ultra-modern, four-story building with huge glass windows that reflect the bay across the street.
On the afternoon of July 7, 2016, it slowly began to be closed.
As students and faculty filed out under overcast skies, red lights began flashing at the entrances. Ultimately, only a handful of people remained inside, preparing to unleash one of the most destructive forces in the natural world: the crushing weight of ocean water approximately 2.5 miles deep.
In the building’s high-pressure testing facility, a black, pill-shaped capsule hung from a lift in the ceiling. It was about 3 feet long and was a scale model of what is known as a submarine Cyclops 2, developed by a local startup called OceanGate. The company’s CEO, Stockton Rush, co-founded the company in 2009 as a type of submarine charter service, anticipating the growing demand for commercial and research travel to the ocean floor. Initially, Rush acquired older steel-hulled submarines for expeditions, but in 2013 OceanGate began designing what the company described as a “revolutionary new crewed submarine.” Among the submarine’s innovations was a lightweight hull that was constructed of carbon fiber and could accommodate more passengers than the spherical cabins traditionally used for deep-sea diving. By 2016, Rush’s dream was to take paying customers to the most famed wreck of all: Titanic3,800 meters below the surface of the Atlantic Ocean.
Engineers carefully lowered Cyclops 2 model into the test tank from the front, like a bomb being loaded into a silo, and then bolted to the 3,600-pound tank cover. They then began pumping water, increasing the pressure to imitate a submarine diving. If you are at sea level, the weight of the atmosphere above you exerts a pressure of 14.7 pounds per square inch (psi). The deeper you go, the stronger the pressure; on Titanicdepth, pressure is about 6500 psi. Soon the pressure gauge on the UW test tank read 1,000 psi and it kept ticking – 2,000 psi, 5,000 psi. At approximately 73 minutes, when the tank pressure reached 6,500 psi, there was a sudden roar and the tank shuddered violently.
“I felt it in my body,” the OceanGate employee wrote in an email later that evening. “The building swayed and my ears were ringing for a long time.”
“I scared the hell out of everyone,” he added.
The model exploded thousands of meters compact of the safety margin for which OceanGate had been designed.
In a world of crewed submarines where the stakes are high and pricey, most engineering teams would go back to the drawing board or at least order more models to test. Rush’s company did none of these things. Instead, within a few months, OceanGate began construction of a full-scale facility Cyclops 2 based on the imploded model. This underwater project, later renamed titaniumfinally got to Titanic in 2021. He even returned to the site for expeditions for the next two years. But almost a year ago, on June 18, 2023, titanium dove into the infamous wreck and exploded, instantly killing all five people on board, including Rush himself.