marine science The University of Washington building in Seattle is a bright, modern four-story structure with large glass windows that reflect the bay across the street.
On the afternoon of July 7, 2016, it was slowly closing down.
As students and faculty lined up under a cloudy sky, red lights began flashing at the entrance. In the end, only a handful of people remained inside, ready to unleash the crushing force of some 2½ miles of sea water, one of the most destructive forces in nature.
In the building’s high-pressure testing facility, black pill-shaped capsules were suspended from hoists in the ceiling. It was a scale model of a submersible about 3 feet long. Cyclops 2, developed by a local startup called OceanGate. The company’s CEO, Stockton Rush, co-founded the company in 2009 as a kind of submarine charter service in anticipation of growing demand for commercial and research trips to the ocean floor. Initially, Rush purchased old steel-hulled submarines for exploration, but in 2013 OceanGate began designing what the company calls a “revolutionary new manned submersible.” Among the submarine’s innovations was a lightweight hull made of carbon fiber that could accommodate more passengers than the older cabins traditionally used for deep-sea diving. Until 2016, Rush’s dream was to take paying customers to the most famous shipwrecks. giant3,800 m below the surface of the Atlantic Ocean.
Engineers are careful Cyclops 2 You first apply the model to a test tank, like loading a bomb into a silo and then screwing on the tank’s 3,600-pound lid. They then began pumping water, increasing the pressure to mimic the dive of a submersible. If you’re playing at sea level, the air above your head weighs 14.7 pounds per square inch (psi). The deeper you go, the stronger the pressure becomes. from giantDepth, pressure is about 6,500 psi. Soon the pressure gauge in the UW test tank read 1,000 psi and continued to rise to 2,000 psi and then 5,000 psi. At approximately the 73 minute mark, when the pressure in the tank reached 6,500 psi, a loud noise was suddenly heard and the tank shook violently.
“I felt it in my body,” an OceanGate employee wrote in an email that night. “The building shook and my ears rang for a long time.”
“Everyone was scared,” he added.
The model ruptured thousands of meters short of the safety limits designed by OceanGate.
In the world of high-risk, high-cost crewed submersibles, most engineering teams would have gone back to the drawing board, or at least ordered more models to test. Rush’s company did no such thing. Instead, within a few months, OceanGate began construction in earnest. Cyclops 2 It is based on an imploded model. This submersible design was later renamed Submersible. Titanfinally arrived giant 2021. We also returned to the site for exploration over the next two years. But almost a year ago, on June 18, 2023 Titan It plunged into the infamous wreck and exploded, killing all five people on board instantly, including Rush himself.
