The Coast Guard has shared an interesting development regarding an everyday item that survived the OceanGate Titan sub disaster.
On June 18, 2023, OceanGate's Titan submersible embarked on its first planned dive of the year, heading to the wreckage of the Titanic with five crew members on board.
On it's descent - around 320 nautical miles (590 km) south-southeast off the coast of Newfoundland - the vessel lost contact with its mothership, the Polar Prince. It then failed to resurface at the time it was expected to, leading to vast search efforts being launched to try and locate the sub, in case it had surfaced in a different location.
On board were tourists Hamish Harding, Shahzada Dawood, his son Suleman Dawood, crew member and Titanic expert Paul-Henri Nargeolet, and OceanGate founder Stockton Rush, who was the pilot of the sub.
Tragically, on June 22, 2023, it was confirmed that the submersible had imploded, killing all five people on board instantly.
Now, a new find revealed in a new video posted by Discovery to TikTok has left both officials and viewers astonished, as reported by the Daily Mail.
A member of the US Coast Guard broke down the painstaking recovery process, which involved sifting through “sludge-like” remains to identify what was human, what was wreckage, and what had somehow survived the deep-sea implosion.
“Let's consider the endcap to be a bowl, a mixing bowl,” the official explained. “Items that were inside of the Titan at the time now become encased inside of the endcap.”
The Titan’s endcap - a structural component shaped like a bowl - was remarkably still intact.
Once it was drained of water, investigators could begin sorting through the fragments left behind from the catastrophic June 2023 implosion that claimed five lives, including Rush’s.
“We were all just kind of getting all-hands-in and separating what needed to be considered as human remains and what was just other wreckage pieces,” the official explained. “As we were pulling it apart that is how we realized it was Mr. Rush's clothing.”
And inside that clothing was a surreal discovery.
“It was a piece of his sleeve that survived, not the whole suit, just that. Inside of the sleeve of it was the ink pen, business cards and stickers for the Titanic and there was nothing else but that,” the official said.
Even more astonishing was that the pen was completely unbroken.
“Each one of those pieces, even the pen, was still intact. It hadn't been broken. All of this debris, all of these things shattered but his pen was still intact,” the official added.
The ink pen wasn’t alone. Other items recovered during the mission included business cards, Titanic-themed stickers, clothing remnants, and human remains - all of which have since been cataloged by the Coast Guard’s Marine Board of Investigation (MBI), which continues to review the disaster.