A civilian submersible with five people on board went missing on Sunday in the North Atlantic Ocean while voyaging to the wreckage of the famous steamship Titanic.
The United States and Canadian coast guards are conducting a massive search operation for the 21-feet vessel, which is equipped with only four days of emergency capabilities.
Now, reports suggest that signs of life have been detected in the search area.
The US Coast Guard has tweeted that a Canadian surveillance aircraft had detected underwater noises while looking for the tourist submersible.
Underwater operations by remotely-operated vehicles have been relocated to search for the origin of the noises. “Canadian P-3 aircraft detected underwater noises in the search area. As a result, ROV operations were relocated in an attempt to explore the origin of the noises. Those ROV searches have yielded negative results but continue,” the Coast Guard said on Twitter.
The US Coast Guard added that US navy experts were analysing the sounds.
“Additionally, the data from the P-3 aircraft has been shared with our US Navy experts for further analysis which will be considered in future search plans,” the Coast Guard’s tweet stated.
The search and rescue crews are scouring the ocean’s surface about 900 miles east of Cape Cod and using the sonar to listen for sounds far below the water. This is a difficult task as the water is up to 13,000 feet deep in the area.
New York-based Explorers Club, which had members on the vanished submersible, has issued a statement on the recent developments on Twitter.
The club wrote, “We understand that likely signs of life have been detected at the site. We await hopefully good news.”
President of the Explorers Club Richard Garriott de Cayeux has retweeted the statement from his official handle.
A CNN report has cited an internal government memo update on the search, which suggests that search teams detected banging sounds in 30-minute intervals in the area where the submersible had disappeared.
Interestingly, banging was still heard four hours later, after more sonar devices were deployed by rescuers.
British businessman Hamish Harding, Pakistani businessman Shahzada Dawood and his teenage son, French explorer Paul-Henri Nargeolet, and Stockton Rush, the CEO of OceanGate, the company that operates the vessel, were onboard the tourist submersible, which has gone missing.
