Wreckage of the Titan’s innovative carbon fiber hull was found separated into three distinct layers, US National Transportation Safety Board engineer Donald Kramer has told a Coast Guard hearing into the fatal implosion of the OceanGate submersible in 2023. Although Kramer would not offer an opinion on what caused the …
Read More »The Titan Submersible Disaster Hearings Paint a Damning Picture
Four days, 10 witnesses, and dozens of exhibits in the US Coast Guard’s Marine Board of Investigation hearing on the Titan submersible implosion have made public a flood of information about the doomed vessel’s design and operation. But one thing the hearings have not yet explained is why the submersible …
Read More »‘I Told Him I’m Not Getting in It’: Former Titan Submersible Engineer Testifies
The US Coast Guard’s Titan submersible hearing kicked off with a startling revelation. “I told him I’m not getting in it,” former OceanGate engineering director Tony Nissen said to a panel of Coast Guard investigators, referring to a 2018 conversation in which CEO Stockton Rush allegedly asked Nissen to act …
Read More »The Coast Guard’s OceanGate Hearings Start Next Week—but Key Witnesses Won’t Appear
On Monday, September 16, the US Coast Guard is convening a Marine Board of Investigation hearing into the loss of OceanGate’s Titan submersible in June 2023 and the deaths of the five people on board, including OceanGate CEO Stockton Rush. It intends to use the two-week livestreamed hearing in Charleston, …
Read More »A Rare Coincidence of La Niña Events Will Weaken Hurricane Season
THIS ARTICLE IS republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. The North Atlantic Ocean has been running a fever for months, with surface temperatures at or near record highs. But cooling along the equator in both the Atlantic and eastern Pacific may finally be starting to bring some …
Read More »Bayesian Yacht Sinking: Climate Change Created Perfect Storm for Waterspouts
The waterspout blamed for the deadly sinking of a luxury superyacht carrying the British tech billionaire Mike Lynch in Italy has been called a freak “black swan” event. But scientists believe this kind of marine tornado is becoming more common with global warming. While the cause of the sinking of …
Read More »The Hugely Important Ocean Current You’ve Never Heard Of
If you haven’t heard of it before, you’re about to become intimately familiar with the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation. This system of currents—which brings water up the Atlantic from the southern tip of South America, through the tropics, and all the way to the coast of Iceland before looping back …
Read More »The Mysterious Discovery of ‘Dark Oxygen’ on the Ocean Floor
This story originally appeared on WIRED Italia and has been translated from Italian. For more than 10 years, Andrew Sweetman and his colleagues have been studying the ocean floor and its ecosystems, particularly in the Pacific’s Clarion-Clipperton Zone, an area littered with polymetallic nodules. As big as potatoes, these rocks …
Read More »The Titan Submersible Disaster Shocked the World. The Inside Story Is More Disturbing Than Anyone Imagined
The Ocean Sciences Building at the University of Washington in Seattle is a brightly modern, four-story structure, with large glass windows reflecting the bay across the street. On the afternoon of July 7, 2016, it was being slowly locked down. Red lights began flashing at the entrances as students and …
Read More »Cities Aren’t Prepared for a Crucial Part of Sea Level Rise: They’re Also Sinking
Fighting off rising seas without reducing humanity’s carbon emissions is like trying to drain a bathtub without turning off the tap. But increasingly, scientists are sounding the alarm on yet another problem compounding the crisis for coastal cities: Their land is also sinking, a phenomenon known as subsidence. The metaphorical …
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