Breach for Titanic sub would be ‘game over’ with ‘air forced out mouth’

A hull breach of a submarine at the depth of the wreck of the Titanic would force all the air out of someone via the mouth and drown them instantly.

Hole breaches are rare, something Dr C. Nicolai Roterman, a deep-sea ecologist and academic at the University of Portsmouth, had, “not actually heard of… ever happening”.

Mystery remains about the location and fate of the commercial submarine, Titan, operated by OceanGate, to explore the wreckage of the Titanic.

READ MORE: Three Brits residents on missing sub trip to cursed Titanic – including father and son

The sub lost contact with its mother ship around one hour and 45 minutes into its eight-hour operation, sparking a major search operation from US and Canadian authorities.

Speaking to the Daily Star, Dr Nicolai Roterman explained the realities of the pressure that deep in the ocean, and what would happen if the worst-case scenario came to pass.

He explained that the pressure down there was: “380 times the atmospheric pressure [at sea level ] – to put that into a context that works out around five-and-a-half-thousand pounds per square inch on that hole – or at least well over 100 times the pressure that you've gotten your car tire.”

If that were to happen, he explained how with “those kinds of extreme pressures the water would rush [in] incredibly quickly”.

For the people inside, this would be catastrophic: "If there's a hole breach I think that would be game over quickly."

Acknowledging he wasn’t an expert on the exact and specific repercussions for a human body under such pressure, he explained: “If it's the hole breaches [there could be] some kind of large pieces of metal moving very rapidly, then that can obviously result in blunt trauma.

“But as far as the human body is concerned, it's not going to squish into a tiny ball or anything.

“The air will be forced out of the body very quickly through the mouth, basically. And they will sort of instantaneously drown.

“There would probably be some kind of trauma from the pressure of the water.”

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