Operated by OceanGate Expeditions, a private company based in Washington state, the tourist vessel lost contact with its mother ship after departing on Sunday. The remnants of the ship lie about 900 miles (1,450 kilometers) off the coast of Cape Cod, Massachusetts, and about 12,500 feet (3,800 meters) underwater. The submersible, which is believed to have been destroyed in a catastrophic implosion, killing all five people aboard, was en route to explore the wreckage of the RMS Titanic. The environment is dark with almost no visibility. There’s a reason deep-sea exploration by humans has been so limited: Traveling to the ocean’s depths means entering a realm with enormous levels of pressure the farther you descend - a high-risk endeavor.
Gene Feldman, an oceanographer emeritus at NASA who spent more than 30 years at the space agency. In fact, “we have better maps of the moon and Mars than we do of our own planet,” said Dr.
While 12 astronauts have spent a collective total of 300 hours on the lunar surface, only three people have spent around three hours exploring Challenger Deep, the deepest known point of Earth’s seabed, according to the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. Researchers often say that traveling to space is easier than plunging to the bottom of the ocean. Though people have been exploring the ocean’s surface for tens of thousands of years, only about 20% of the seafloor has been mapped, according to 2022 figures from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. The submersible vehicle that was lost at sea is part of a relatively new effort enabling tourists and other paying customers to explore the depths of the ocean, the vast majority of which has never been seen by human eyes.
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