The US Coast Guard and tour company OceanGate Expeditions said Thursday that the five passengers of the Titanic-bound submersible are dead.
“We now believe that our CEO Stockton Rush, Shahzada Dawood and his son Suleman Dawood, Hamish Harding and Paul-Henri Nargeolet, have sadly been lost,” the company said in a statement.
The US Coast Guard said the debris discovered by rescuers was consistent with a “catastrophic implosion of the vessel.”
The vessel, called the Titan, lost contact with its mother ship Sunday morning, about 1 hour and 45 minutes into the trip down to nearly 13,000 feet in the North Atlantic to view the wreckage of the Titanic.
The Titanic lies around 12,500 feet below sea level. For perspective, the world’s deepest scuba dive reached 1,090 feet in 2022, while the world’s tallest building, the Burj Khalifa, would only go down 2,717 feet into the ocean – still roughly 9,700 feet short of reaching the Titanic wreckage.
See just how deep the Titanic tourist submersible was headed before it went missing.
View this interactive content on CNN.com